


time to rest

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, and I'm allergic to research, anyway, brienne as governess for the stark girls, brienne: I was raised to be a Proper Lady which means I'm not having dreams about rawing my boss :), cat as dead wife (sorry cat I love you), don't @ me i wrote this in like 6 days, except i haven't seen/read any of those things in years, ghost fic, it's about the self loathing, it's also apparently about the repression, it's that kinda fic, jaime as drunk stepfather, past jaime/cat, this is like...half turn of the screw/bly manor half Mama (2013), when does this fic take place? spooky times, with sprinkles of crimson peak aesthetic, you know when electricity was still a baby and there were lots of ghosts around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27273001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Brienne Tarth is hired as a governess for Sansa and Arya Stark, under the care of their stepfather, Jaime Lannister. Winterfell is a beautiful old castle, far in the north. If Brienne was a less practical woman, she might fear it was haunted.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 50
Kudos: 240





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! 6 days ago I said, "I want to write a spooky fic before Halloween", and then I lost my mind and wrote 30k, so here's the first part! I'm hoping to get it all posted by the 31st, so then I can...focus on NaNo....and more writing....
> 
> (this fic may have been a mistake!)

The woman who introduced herself as Mr. Lannister’s assistant was a pretty girl, and young. Brienne tried not to notice a person’s looks, especially other women—being considered unattractive herself, she was loath to participate in the sort of judgements that had always made her so miserable. But Pia Peckledon was a pretty that was impossible to miss. Pretty, pleasant, personable. Her smile brought it out, and she had been smiling since Brienne arrived for the interview, and she seemed unlikely to stop. She had plump, well-shaped arms and the kind of gleaming chestnut hair that Brienne had always envied. More, she was _kind._ Kind in an effortless way that told Brienne that Pia was a good person, in addition to being a pretty one. Brienne felt like a dour old maid beside her, but she liked her immensely; she had met plenty of women who were as pretty or prettier than Pia, but Pia’s kindness set her apart, and raised her into beauty.

Sometimes, Brienne thought that a jealous creature lived within everyone, and that you had to actively work to overcome it. It was hard to look at Pia without feeling it: envy. Sadness. A childish longing to have been born with a different face. But Brienne was old enough now that she had become used to those things, and she knew to ignore them. Perhaps she _was_ a dour old maid, but she was a dour old maid who had so far lived a good life, and she was not ashamed anymore that she had not been built more delicate, or more womanly, or more beautiful.

Pia remembered all of Brienne’s references without having to look down at the papers in front of her, and she was ready to answer all of Brienne’s questions. Any hesitance bled out of Brienne over the course of the interview. She knew little about Jaime Lannister, except the gossip that surrounded his family, and not much of that was good. His father was a ruthless business magnate. She knew that much. She knew, too, that his siblings were known for various almost-scandals that were hushed up but not forgotten. Brienne was not technically in their social circle, but her father was a wealthy man, of a good house, and so she was in the circle _enough_ to hear the stories that were passed around. And her position as governess meant that she heard the stories that those in the upper classes weren’t meant to hear.

Jaime, Pia assured her casually, without seeming as if she was making a _point_ of it, had nothing at all to do with his family anymore. The Lannister name had been mired in scandal for the past year or so, and it made sense that Pia would distance her boss from that as early as possible, but it was still something of a relief to hear.

In the past, when Brienne interviewed for positions, she found herself scrambling to impress the interviewer, but in this case it seemed like Pia was scrambling to impress _her._ Brienne knew that the advertisement had been up for quite a while. Maybe the Lannister name was more corrupted than she thought, or maybe most respectable governesses had been frightened off by the rumors that surrounded the death of Mr. Lannister’s wife.

“You are aware that Mr. Lannister is the stepfather of the children,” Pia said, in a tone that didn’t quite make it out to be a question. Brienne felt rather caught, though she wasn’t sure she should. She hadn’t set out to hide the fact that she had some prior knowledge of the family. It just never came up.

“I am,” she said. “I was acquainted with Mrs. Lannister when I was working at Storm’s End. She was a very kind woman, and I considered us friends, for that short time. I was sorry to hear of her passing.”

“Yes,” Pia agreed, with a perfectly polite amount of sympathy. “Mrs. Lannister was a wonderful woman. Are you acquainted with the children as well?”

“No, unfortunately not.” Brienne had met Catelyn Lannister only the once, though it was for a period of a little more than a month, in Storm’s End. Brienne had been caring for the eldest Baratheon brother's natural child, and Catelyn's visit had been extended beyond the week it was meant to last. It was not long after her first husband had been killed, and she was anxious to return to her children, but travel had been difficult, with winter snows reaching into the south, and she had been persuaded to wait for the thaw.

She admitted to finding comfort in spending time with the boy, and in spending time with Brienne as well. They had shared many conversations; Catelyn had been distracted, and grieving, and the Baratheon brothers were a lot to handle, especially as they had all known and grieved Ned in their own, loud ways, and constantly felt the need to present that grief to Catelyn, as if it was something she needed. Brienne knew that her company was a kind of balm for Catelyn, because Brienne had not known Ned Stark at all, and she was too polite to ask any questions, and too well bred to say anything of her sympathy beyond what common courtesy dictated. Catelyn spent the time asking kind questions about Brienne’s home, and sharing stories about her children. She spoke of them, a boy and two girls, with an intense love that made Brienne feel affection for them as well. Brienne had not had much luck befriending ladies before. Catelyn was the first woman she ever felt a real kinship with. They’d written to each other a few times in the years that followed. Perhaps that wasn’t much of a friendship to a woman like Catelyn, but it had meant a lot to Brienne. “She spoke of the children often, though. I understand that the eldest is at school.”

“Yes, he stays with Mrs. Lannister’s uncle in Riverrun on holidays, and he rarely returns home. The daughters will be your responsibility. They are eleven and nine.” Brienne nodded; she’d guessed they were around that age. Ned Stark died only a few years after the youngest girl’s birth. “There is a housekeeper, Ms. Donyse, and the Paynes, the grocer and his nephew, will stop by to deliver groceries from time to time. But you will be the only other person living on the property with the family. Are you familiar with Mr. Lannister at all?”

There was something a bit hesitant in her voice. She hid it well behind casual interest, but Brienne noticed it.

“No,” she said slowly, and Pia seemed…maybe not relieved, but something. She shifted her papers around on her desk as she considered what to say. Brienne was aware of a little tickle of something at the back of her mind. _She’s pleased that she gets to control the narrative_. Not a charitable thought, but…not inaccurate, she didn’t think.

“He’s wonderful,” Pia said. Her praise was colored only slightly by the defensiveness that ran behind it. “It isn’t every man who would hire me to take care of his affairs in King’s Landing while he’s in the north, and I’m very grateful for what he’s done for me.” Brienne had never heard a better setup for a “but”. Pia still hesitated before saying, “he has been going through a difficult time since Mrs. Lannister’s death.”

“Of course,” Brienne said. Polite distance colored her tone, but inwardly she was roiling with curiosity. A difficult time? What did _that_ mean? Catelyn’s death was not so long ago that it was odd to think he might still be grieving, but Pia’s tone was too wary. Too warning. “I would not hold that against him.”

“He prefers not to be disturbed with the day-to-day concerns of the children. They will eat dinner together, but aside from that…you will be their primary caretaker, and you will keep them out of the library and the study where he does most of his work.” She hesitated before she said _work_ , too.

Brienne nodded, because she knew how these things were. She had been working as a governess for years now, and every father in every family was different, but none of them were very interested in the lives of their children. They loved them, perhaps, to varying degrees. They _cared_ about them. They wanted them to be well looked after. They just did not want to deal with the messiness and the frustration that children brought. That was why they hired her.

If Pia feared that Brienne would judge Mr. Lannister harshly for wanting his stepdaughters out of his way, she could rest easy. Brienne would judge him simply as much as she judged the rest of them, which was to say: fairly.

* * *

Winterfell was a distinguished old castle in the north of Westeros, surrounded by acres of trees and open plains, where snow gathered months before it fell anywhere else, and lingered long after spring had thawed the rest of the continent. It was one of the last great remaining castles. Evenfall, Brienne’s home, was one of them. The Red Keep. Casterly Rock. Storm’s End. The Eyrie. Brienne had seen most of them, but the north felt older than the rest of Westeros, and so it was no surprise that the castle felt older, too.

Brienne knew how far north Winterfell lay on all the maps, but she was still surprised by the length of the journey. There was so much _space_ in the north. She took a train starting in King’s Landing, and she stared out the window and watched the scenery pass by. After they left the Twins, it was unbroken for ages. Snow and rock and small clusters of trees. The train rumbled along its tracks and wound around mountains and over great rivers and through marshes. Most of what she saw was blank, unbroken snow. Hills became landmarks. A farm was a shocking surprise. So few towns, so little life. It was beautiful, but it made her feel cold inside, to know that the girls lived all the way up here, with so little chance for company. Wintertown, she knew, was not far from Winterfell’s walls, and White Harbor was not so very distant as well, but it still seemed like so little. They were growing girls who should have been preparing to be introduced into society, and instead they were hidden away.

Despite the importance with which she rated her acquaintance with Catelyn Stark, Brienne knew little about the north, and less still about Winterfell itself. Catelyn had called her home _cold, but lovely_ , and said that it fit in the north the same way Riverrun fit in the Riverlands, and the same way the Red Keep fit in King’s Landing. Brienne could see already how that would be true. She left the train at Wintertown and was met by a hired coachmen, sent by Pia to pick her up. The thin cloak she had brought with her was pathetic against the cold, and she was grateful when she found a parcel addressed to her on the seat: a much more practical traveling cloak, lined with fur. An extravagant present, but Brienne was not too proud to accept it.

She wished that she and Pia could have made the drive together, but Pia was already back up at Winterfell, preparing for Brienne’s arrival. She had a house in Wintertown that she shared with her husband, the gardener for the castle, but she had assured Brienne that she visited the castle often, and would be able to answer any of Brienne’s questions. It made Brienne hopeful that perhaps there could be a true friendship between them.

Her nerves built as they got closer to the castle. She was always nervous when she started a new job. There was an element of unknown, of uncertainty. The girls might hate her. Mr. Lannister might be impossible to work with. She knew that the nervousness would likely prove to be for nothing. She rarely had trouble with new postings. She could endure much, and she was quick to adapt to new circumstances, and she was a sturdy, steady woman. She’d been told more than once that she was _meant to be a governess_ , which was a kind enough thing to say, she thought. She wasn’t sure if the man in question meant it as such, but she had worn it proudly, while she helped to raise his nephew. Women of her station were expected to marry, but Brienne had long ago tired of feeling like she wasn’t good enough for that, and she chose instead to focus on things she knew she _could_ be proud of. Things that made her _of use_.

When they reached the castle at last, turned through the gate and headed up the approach, Brienne did her best not to gape. It wasn’t polite to look so curious about these things, but she couldn’t help it. Winterfell was a big, sprawling, ugly thing, she thought. Nothing like the Red Keep, with its careful planning and its soaring turrets and delicate supports. Winterfell looked as if it had been built by someone who didn’t quite know what he was building when he started, but it was charming. Having a fondness for ugly but useful things, she liked the way the different buildings were connected with those unsightly wooden walks, and the way the stonework seemed to have been patched as needed, rather than renovated all at once to make it modern and sleek, like many of the other restored places. She loved her home on Tarth, but her father’s father had essentially destroyed the old castle to make his new, modern manor, and she had always wished that he had kept the original stonework. Winterfell felt closer to history than Evenfall did, and Brienne thought it was the kind of home in which she could be happy.

* * *

Before she finalized her acceptance of the position, Brienne had been sure to do her research. She had never been one for society gossip, but it felt necessary, in this case. She had at least wanted to understand what she could expect.

She had a tendency to make friends, at least casually, with the servants of every house she worked at, because she straddled the line between servant and highborn lady. It only took a few letters, sent out discreetly, a few inquiries, to receive enough information that she felt adequately prepared to face it.

Jaime Lannister and Catelyn Stark had married only a few years after Eddard’s death. Not _scandalously_ soon, but too soon for some: despite the marriage beginning as an arrangement between their families, it was understood that there was real love between the Starks, and many of their friends were surprised that she did not grieve for longer. When Eddard was killed on a visit to King’s Landing—a murder that remained unsolved—Catelyn did not give way to her grief in public, which made the whispers worse. She mourned properly, of course. Catelyn always did things properly. But she mourned proudly, and to many people, it was a sign of coldness. Brienne thought it was more a sign of Catelyn’s bearing, and a preference to keep her private grief private, but Brienne was _often_ of the minority opinion when it came to such things.

Mostly the rumors and gossip seemed to be centered on the ongoing, centuries-long social war between the Lannisters and the Starks. They had warred with more than words in generations past, but in recent memory their battles had all been petty social ones. There was still a deep, abiding hatred between most members of both families, and so of course there had been rumors that the Lannisters were involved in Ned Stark’s death. Jaime claiming the wife of the dead man was seen as an attempt to grasp at a final victory over Ned, especially as everyone knew that Jaime and Ned didn’t get along. But Ned was said to have been a dour, serious man, and Jaime a laughing fool, so Brienne didn’t think that some small animosity between them was so odd. And Catelyn was not the sort of woman who would allow herself to be used like that. Brienne wasn’t sure _why_ the marriage took place, but she knew that Catelyn would have chosen Jaime Lannister for a reason.

Jaime and Catelyn were not married long before she, too, died. Those rumors were harder to sift through. There were so many, even from the very few sources from which Brienne had sought information. The official cause was a sudden illness, but people whispered in a knowing way that it was suicide. She couldn’t take being married to her cruel second husband any longer. She was haunted by the ghosts of the Starks, who loathed her for the fact that she had brought a Lannister among them. She could not bear to look herself in the mirror for betraying Ned. Whatever the reasons for it, they all agreed on the outcome. _The poor girls,_ they all said _. I can’t believe she would leave the poor girls with_ him _._

On that front, information was sketchier. There were claims that the girls had _chosen_ to remain at Winterfell with Jaime rather than relocating to live with their aunt in the Eyrie or Catelyn’s uncle in Riverrun. There were also rumors that there had already been marriage propositions for the eldest girl. She was still firmly a child at eleven, but men from great old families were shameless when it came to trying to make matches for their sons. There were attempts to claim Sansa from every quarter, from men as old as her mother to boys as young as two. Jaime, it was said, had turned them all down, and turned them all away, and no longer took the girls on long visits to King’s Landing or Casterly Rock. When he _did_ venture away from Winterfell, it was only to Wintertown, or on very rare occasions White Harbor, and he was always accompanied by the children. Those who had seen them in public said that the girls were quiet, but well fed, and seemed happy enough. What the girls thought about being kept away from society was anyone’s guess. The eldest, Sansa, was a nervous, shy creature who looked to her stepfather before she spoke. The youngest, Arya, rarely spoke to anyone at all, except the lowest born children that she played with in the streets wherever they went. Stories said that Jaime indulged the children excessively, buying whatever they asked for in the shops, allowing them to dress how they pleased. Sansa wore fine silk dresses and all the jewels she wanted, and Arya was said to wear trousers and carry around a fencing foil in a custom-made swordbelt at her hip. Everyone who described the girls seemed amused and wary for Brienne.

_Handfuls_ , they said.

_You’re in for a treat_ , they said.

Brienne found that she liked the sound of the girls. She had been a handful herself, as a child, and she was looking forward to meeting them and seeing how close public perception came to the reality. She knew her own way around a fencing foil, and if Jaime Lannister was willing to indulge his step-daughters in their whims, it could only make Brienne think better of him, though it seemed to make general society think worse.

* * *

Her tentative good opinion of Jaime Lannister was immediately reversed upon meeting him.

He was rather well dressed, with a shirt embroidered with blue winter roses, of all things, and he wore expensive-looking trousers and boots. But it looked as if he did that well dressing three days earlier and hadn’t changed since. His collar was crooked, and several buttons were undone, showing far too much skin. His hair was too long to be fashionable, and too untamed to be fashionable, and it would somehow still be quite fetching if it wasn’t also half lank with a lack of washing. He looked her up and down with bleary red eyes that might have spoken of grief but, Brienne suspected, in his case spoke of a haze of alcohol.

He was also the most attractive man Brienne had ever seen. She tried not to notice those things, especially in the people she worked for. There was a divide between them that she knew better than to try to cross. Her last boss, Renly Baratheon, had been attractive as well, and she had nursed a girlish affection for him for years, though he never showed her any interest. But Jaime Lannister was the sort of attractive that could not go unnoticed or unremarked upon. Everything about his face invited scrutiny, and not even the off-putting personal hygiene could hide it.

He was polite when Pia introduced them, but he was not warm, or welcoming, and so Brienne was left feeling unwelcome. He was oddly cagey, and distrustful, like a trapped creature, or like he didn’t have even the slightest idea who she was or why she was in his house. His shoulders were hunched with tension, and there were bruises under his eyes. He looked like a man who had not slept well in a very long time, and she pitied him, but it didn’t make her any more disposed to like him. The gossip of an indulgent stepfather seemed, in this light, more like laziness, or inattentiveness. He blinked up at her with a quizzical expression like he had no idea what one was even supposed to _do_ with a governess.

But even in the initial first impression, there were things about him that Brienne could not judge harshly. Obviously he was not terrible to look at, even if it came in a rather poorly wrapped package. She also liked that he was attentive to Pia, and that he asked after her husband and her new child as if he truly cared, and she also liked that he seemed amused and pleased with Pia’s long-winded, chattering answer. He also seemed to rate her competence highly, and waved off several moments during which she tried to overexplain some choice or other she had made on his behalf. He trusted her. That much was plain. Trusted her not just to be honest with him, but trusted her to handle her role with competence, and Brienne could see how much it meant to the girl.

He was distracted, though, and not quite fully there, and he nodded and ran his hand through his hair and scratched at his beard while Pia talked. But when she was finished, he was able to say something kind and intuitive enough that it made Pia smile, so he must have been paying some kind of attention. When it was time at last for Pia to head back to town, she put her hand on his arm, and she squeezed it gently.

“Be good,” she said, and he laughed at her. Fond, knowing. She smiled back at him.

When Pia was gone, and they were alone, he gave Brienne another long look.

“This wasn’t my idea,” he said. “Pia thought the girls needed another governess. The last one quit.”

“Oh?” Brienne asked politely.

“Arya jabbed her with the foil one too many times, I expect,” he said, and he gave Brienne a lopsided grin that was devastating in its handsomeness. Brienne pretended not to notice, and she averted her eyes. Looked at everything but him as Jaime led her to the room where she would be staying. The castle was large. Bigger than she expected. She could already foresee an embarrassing habit of getting lost and turned around in its hallways for the first few weeks, just like at Storm’s End. But she had come to know that place as well as her own home, in time, and she suspected that the same thing would happen here. She liked it, too. Despite the look of the outside, Winterfell’s halls and living spaces had been well maintained, and updated with modern improvements that kept it from feeling too unstuck from time.

The room to which Jaime led her was in the family’s quarters, which she hadn’t expected. In Storms End, her room had been very nice, and large enough to suit her, but it had been firmly in the servant’s quarters. She had for the most part been treated like family there, but an actual _room_ in the family's hall? It felt like a misstep on Jaime’s part. Like he should have known better. But she didn’t know how to bring it up, and so she didn’t.

It was a beautiful room. The bed was plush, the carpet soft, the furniture huge and welcoming. There was a fireplace in the corner of the room, and there were beautiful tapestries on the walls that depicted ancient battles and weirwood trees and flocks of crows.

“The last governess took rooms in the village,” Jaime said, apparently misinterpreting her reluctance for disappointment. The last governess had probably been uncomfortable with the fine room, too. “If you’d like, I could have Pia set you up there. She thought the girls would be better off with you in house, but…”

“Of course,” Brienne said. “I’m happy to stay here.”

He hesitated, and he looked her over again. He was holding on to the door very tightly. She knew that he would be swaying on his feet without it. She did not let her disgust touch her expression. Just watched him, pleasantly polite, and waited. He shook his head.

“As you wish,” he said. He spoke so bitterly that she wondered if he _wanted_ her to take the place in the village. She didn’t know how to change her mind without seeming flighty, or frightened, so she didn’t. She just waited, watching him. She could not think of anything to say. He looked around the room one more time. “When the lights go out in this house, they stay out. You would do well to keep to your bed, rather than wandering about. We have hired guards on the grounds at night, and I would hate for them to think you an intruder.”

It was the first time she had heard anything of guards. She nodded anyway.

“Of course, Mr. Lannister,” she said.

“Call me Jaime,” he said. She nodded again, though she did not plan to listen. There was no polite friendliness in his tone, nothing that would prompt such an intimacy. He left without another word, and went down the stairs to the library, and shut himself in.

* * *

The early days passed quickly in the company of the two girls. Catelyn had talked of them often, and Brienne found that their mother’s descriptions had been fair ones. Sansa was sweet, and a pretty little child, well put together and always polite. She was engaged in her lessons, and she loved to bake, and read, and make things. She was particularly adept with embroidery, which was a skill Brienne had never mastered, and so a skill she had always admired. Arya was unlike her sister in nearly every way. She was wild, and cared nothing at all for lessons, except when Brienne offered to include fencing as one of their daily seasions. Sansa sewed in the corner while Arya and Brienne faced off, and the little girl’s eyes glittered with excitement. When forced to sit still and learn, she had a clever mind, and a head for memorization, but she was easily bored with stillness, and grew prickly and annoyed if her work was compared with Sansa’s. Brienne learned quickly what both girls needed from her, and she was able to get them through their days with a minimum of fuss.

Both girls seemed, in alignment with public opinion, happy enough. But there was an undercurrent of sadness and a little bit of fear in them that was all too easy to understand. Their futures were so uncertain, and even children could sense those things, as much as adults tried to shield them. Brienne remembered well what it was like to be their age, when it became impossible to avoid thinking of what would happen when she grew up. Her father had indulged her as a girl, letting her run wild on the island with all sorts of friends. She’d been a tall, gangly girl, not made to be sitting straight and correctly and forcing her clumsy fingers to do intricate needlework.

But as she got older, her father pulled on her reins. Told her that she could no longer be the girl he’d encouraged her to be. She was to be a lady. Everything had to change. A new governess was hired. New dresses were made. Those friends were banished back to their villages, and Brienne was not to speak to them any longer. It would not be proper.

It was a difficult age, and having lost both their parents, and their mother so recently, could only make it harder. Brienne didn’t wish to break Arya of her spirited ways, certainly not as long as Jaime seemed willing to allow them, but she ached to know that it could not continue forever. She ached for Sansa, too, because she knew that Sansa could continue learning, and continue mastering accomplishments that were proper for a young girl, and she still might end up in a miserable marriage. Nothing was guaranteed for ladies. Brienne knew that better than anyone, and she knew that she would have to prepare them without being cruel.

Her own governess, Ms. Roelle, was not to be emulated. Best forgotten, in fact, but that was impossible, so all Brienne could do was ignore the memories, and to be a kinder guide than that woman had been to her.

She made friends with the girls quickly. She told them about losing her mother when she was young, and they kindly accepted her sympathies, but they also didn’t seem to want to talk about it very much. Brienne didn’t try to force them into the subject, and she believed they liked her better for it.

She rarely saw Jaime, and even more rarely spoke to him. The first few days, she sometimes found it necessary to track him down so that she could ask him questions about particulars, and he was always unfailingly polite, if distant, and seemingly baffled as to why she thought it was proper to ask him. He was usually in his precious library when she found him. Pia had mentioned _work_ as the reason for Jaime’s seclusion in the library and the study, but as far as Brienne could tell, Jaime did nothing but read, write the occasional letter, and drink while staring into the fireplace. Brienne always left those conversations with him wondering just how many of the things he said were earnest and how many sarcastic, and having no idea how to answer. He seemed to have no strong opinions about anything involving the children, and he deflected her to Pia for every query about their education. It made Brienne angry for them, these girls saddled with a stepfather who would rather drink the day away than spend any time with them.

She would think that he had no interest in them at all, except for the dinners.

Every night, the three of them ate dinner together. For the first few weeks, Brienne ate alone in the kitchen, or with the housekeeper, if she was staying late, or Pia, if she was around with her husband. Jaime and the girls ate in the formal dining room, and Brienne had no idea what they discussed, but she imagined a cold, stilted conversation. After those first weeks, Sansa asked if Brienne could eat with them at the table, and so she joined the family there for her meals. The first night, she entered the room to find that there were _two_ empty place settings. One was across from Sansa. The other was at the head of the table.

“Mother’s seat,” Arya said, when Brienne hesitated by the chair at the head of the table. Brienne nodded, and she sat across from Sansa instead.

It was an illuminating time, those dinners. Jaime was somehow charming during them, and seemed almost sober. Almost. He asked the girls about their lessons. Sansa answered faithfully, and Arya spun stories about lessons that she certainly had _not_ been learning, like how to climb up the side of the Broken Tower using only one hand, or how to hold her breath for two hours. Jaime treated those lies as if they were fascinating truths, and he was a good enough actor that Arya laughed and spun more, and Brienne could see the real amusement and delight coming out from behind the sheen of inebriation that always hovered around him. She knew she should warn Arya not to lie, and she knew she should tell Jaime not to encourage her, but she couldn’t bear it. They were all so almost-happy, at the dinners. Jaime asked Sansa about the books she was reading, and no matter what the book was, he seemed to have read it, and knew exactly what she was talking about. Brienne wondered where this man hid, the majority of the time. He was still haunted at dinner, and a little odd, and she knew that he was probably just _hiding_ his level of drunkenness, but he made a real effort, and it made a difference. When he interacted with the girls during the day, he always seemed a bit backed into a corner. A bit off. Like he was afraid of speaking to them. But not at their dinners. At their dinners, he seemed to soak everything up. A sponge, laughing and being proud of them and being kind to them. Brienne soaked it in, too, this proof that they were cared for. She only stepped in to prevent the worst of the indulgences—when Arya asked for a new knife, and Jaime asked “what kind”, or when Sansa asked about another silk dress, this one in lavender, and Jaime told her to draw him a picture so he could send it off to have it made, and Brienne felt obliged to remind them both that Sansa already _had_ a silk dress in lavender, in the back of her closet, largely unworn.

The time spent together at dinner made Brienne sleep more easily, because she had been worried that her charges would be frightened of their guardian, or that there would be something obviously wrong in his treatment of them. But there wasn’t. The girls were excited every time they saw him, and they talked about him like he was a part of their family. He was _Jaime_ , never _father_ , and perhaps his indulgences and his apparent disinterest in being involved in any discipline made him more like an elder brother than a father, but at least he was _something_.

The relationship was difficult to puzzle out. Jaime and Catelyn had not been married for very long, but Jaime seemed dedicated to the children, and they seemed dedicated to him in turn. Brienne wanted to ask. She was filled with curiosity. Sometimes she mentioned it, casually, to Pia or the housekeeper, trying to ferret out anything that would help her understand. But everybody in the house seemed dedicated to Jaime in some way, and they gave her nothing but more praise for his good heart and his kindness. They both seemed unsettled by him now, like he was different before, and that didn’t help Brienne’s wonderings at all. What _had_ he been like? A kind man, apparently. Kind to them, anyway, and kind to the children. He still had flashes of kindness that she could see, from time to time, beneath the discomfort and the drunkenness. He must have loved his wife very much, to be so changed by her death.

Every time he spoke to Brienne, she knew there was a chance for cruelty, too. His tone could be cutting, and biting, especially if she took too long to get to the point. He couldn’t stand false politeness, and he told her so more than once, seeing the tension in her, and the stiffness, and the disdain she clearly held for his dependence on alcohol. He grew frustrated with any sort of chat or dithering, unless it was from Pia or the girls. He once told the elder Payne grocer, Ilyn, that he liked him best because Ilyn couldn’t speak. Ilyn laughed like it was a joke, and so did Pia, but it didn’t feel like a joke to Brienne. He was a man who wished to be left alone, as often as possible, for as many hours of the day as he could manage. Brienne indulged him in this as much as possible, because she found his company exhausting. He didn’t seem like the sort of man who could earn so much devotion, and it made her more and more curious. Who had he been? Who was he now?

She knew she had a tendency towards snap judgements. She’d always been that way. It was a form of armor, she knew. She was aware of herself, at least. Aware of the way she behaved and aware of the reasons why. She had never been a good looking woman, and the world did not make way for women who were not beautiful. It rarely made way even for women who _were,_ but women who weren’t could not even choose to follow the path the world wanted to lay out for them: marriage, children. What was a woman meant to do if she could not find a man to marry her? Tarth would go to a distant cousin when her father died, and Brienne had always known that. She became a governess because it was the kind of work that a respectable young woman _could_ get, and because she liked children, and because she had the kind of patient disposition to be a good teacher. But she had not been able to train herself out of some of the more engrained personality flaws she had recognized in herself. Judgement. Stubbornness. A tendency to cling to her impressions of people long past the point of sense. She resolved to try not to do that with this family, but it was difficult. She was also curious. A curious beast who always wanted to know people’s thoughts, even though she usually knew they would not be charitable towards her.

* * *

For the first few weeks, Brienne noticed nothing odd beyond the inherent oddness of the situation. If she felt off-balanced, it was because it was a new house, and a new family, with new rules. It was because the view outside her window was always of snow, and she was not used to it yet. It was because she missed the sea air, and the sound of waves, and the warmth. But she would adapt, and she would become used to it, and the oddness would go away in time, as it always did.

She became close with the girls, and she smiled when they talked her up to Jaime at dinner, and Pia when she stopped in, and everyone they spoke to when she took them on short trips to Wintertown. _Our governess, Miss Tarth_ , they always said with pride. They received no guests except those who had been hired from Wintertown to take care of various parts of the castle, all of whom seemed to love the girls, and seemed proud of them, and seemed fond of Jaime as well, in a wary sort of way. The boy, Robb, visited once when the snows began to melt, and he pulled Sansa into a spinning hug in the entryway and ruffled Arya’s hair, and he said that he had heard a lot about Brienne from Sansa’s letters. He was more formal with Jaime, and he didn’t seem as won over by him as the girls, but there was nothing like bad blood between them. They seemed to share a camaraderie she didn’t quite understand, like between two men much closer in age, and Brienne wondered what had caused it. The look they gave each other, like equals. She was half convinced she would have to step in, finding it too easy to imagine Jaime pouring Robb a glass of something foul and trying to hand it off to him. He didn’t, though. Just drank the same as he always did. Still, seeing the way Robb treated them all eased some of her fears. She had worried that Robb stayed away so much because of some strain between he and his stepfather that would bring the whole picture into clearer light. She was relieved to find that that wasn’t the case; Robb treated Jaime with the same incomprehensible mix of pity and admiration and hesitance as everyone else.

By the time Robb left again, back to school, Brienne was feeling more comfortable in the castle, and with her new charges. They were quick girls, and they liked to tease her, and she started to respond to them in kind. Started to follow along with their clever banter that at first had overwhelmed her. She did not fear taking up space, and she visited the kitchen and befriended the younger Payne lad, and she helped the housekeeper with her duties so that the two of them could chat. She and Pia shared cups of tea together in the gardens out back, gossiping about things in the village, or things Pia had heard from King’s Landing, but never the family. At night, Brienne borrowed books from the library and read them by candlelight in her bed, long past when everyone else was asleep. She tiptoed down the hall to check on the girls, and she learned the way the castle felt at night, and she did not let silly impulses and silly fears keep her hidden behind her door, no matter how frequently she felt them. And then, one night, she was thirsty.

* * *

She did not light a candle; she didn’t need one. The moonlight was enough to see by, coming through the windows at the end of the hall, and across from the grand staircase that led to the first floor. The girls’ rooms were off a small hallway across from hers, and she walked down it to be sure that they were abed. There were no sounds within, and no light from under their doors, and she returned to the main hall satisfied. Jaime’s room was a bit further down, closer to the stairs. Candlelight flickered beneath the door, but she heard nothing as she passed, and she managed to sneak by without drawing his notice. She did not once think about his comments on that first day about staying in her room at night. She was only going to get a glass of water, and she was not afraid of the dark.

Once her feet were safely on the first floor, she became less worried about being overheard. The wooden parts of the house could creak sometimes—the stairs, the floors in the hall—but the first floor was stone, and though it was cold on her feet even through her slippers, it also helped her move silently. The loudest sound she made was when she turned on the tap in the kitchen and filled a glass.

She wasn’t a person given to fancies, but it _was_ perhaps a bit eerie how large the castle felt in the dark. Large and _old._ Most of the time, living inside it, it felt modern enough that she could forget. In the dark, it was different. Everything was blurrier, indistinct, somehow grander. So many moments in history took place within Winterfell’s walls, and she seemed to remember all of them now. Every child in Westeros had heard the stories of the Long Night, and the bravery of the people who fought in it, but they were stories. Based in fact, clinging tenaciously to the historical battles by which the more outlandish stories were inspired, but stories nonetheless, except now, for Brienne, when she could imagine it. Dead things stealing silently through the castle. On a night as dark as this, anything could be hiding in the shadows.

She drank standing at the sink, as if she could trick _herself_ into believing that there was not a single part of her that was foolish enough to fear. Then she filled her glass again to take it with her back up to bed. There was a sound from outside, in the distance, that might have been the wind or might have been a wolf. If she was another sort of person, maybe she would have shivered with delightful fright at it, but she had always been, regrettably, very practical, and she only noted it in passing before heading out of the kitchen. She walked down the hall, past the open dining room door, and then she stopped.

She turned back.

The dining room was empty, just as it should have been.

It must have been an odd trick of the light, or the absence of it. For a moment, as she passed, she could have sworn that there was a shape in the chair at the end of the table.

She breathed out slowly. Her heart was pounding. What a silly, foolish thing. She was half ashamed of herself. Still, she stood for a while in the doorway, watching. Trying to figure out what she had seen, trying to recreate the shadow that made her think that she saw something that wasn’t there. She couldn’t. There was nothing. The room was empty. The table had been cleaned, and cleared. The housekeeper left hours ago.

_I’m tired_ , she reasoned. _I’m tired, and exploring a big, old house in the dark._ She had heard ghost stories as a child just like everyone else, and she had heard stories of the dead and the Long Night, and she was in Winterfell, which was old, and had been witness to so much grief. Even _she_ might be tempted to give in to the indulgence of fear of the impossible. When she was younger, and she was still allowed to spend most of her days with the village children, she would listen to their stories about Evenfall and the ghosts that supposedly walked its halls. Sometimes, if she woke in the night, she would lie awake in terror, remembering the things that she was too reasonable to fear during the day.

She knew now that those children were just making up tales, probably on purpose to frighten her, and she did not believe in ghosts any longer. Still, she remembered, and still that younger version of herself existed. The one who had lain awake and stared at the shadows in the corners of the room, convinced that they would move if she looked away for too long. And there was something so instinctive about her fear. She could not have described what she saw in the dining room that frightened her so, but as minutes ticked by and she stood still frozen in the hall, it seemed to her that she remembered the gleam of eyes, catching on the moonlight. It hadn’t all been shadow. There had been a smile, too, hadn’t there? A slash of red in pale skin. Something shimmering, wet.

But no. She would not indulge those thoughts any longer. They were foolish, and they led to panic. It was not a figure, or a shape, or a ghost that smiled. It was a shadow. It was a trick that her tired mind had played on her eyes. It was nothing.

To satisfy the lingering doubts, the part of herself that wondered if it might be an intruder if not a spirit, she lit a candle, and examined the room more thoroughly. There were servant passageways, she was sure, but they were not obvious to her, and she did not think that any person could move so quickly as to hide themselves away in a servant’s passage in the time between when she saw the shadow and when she turned back to find it gone. If she persisted, if she wanted to truly prove to herself that she was safe, she could wake Jaime and have him call in the dogs and the guards. They would search the house, begrudgingly. They would think her hysterical. Flighty.

She hesitated too long. It was easy to talk oneself out of rashness, when one possessed a mind as methodical as Brienne’s. She tried to imagine how Jaime would react to being woken for such foolishness, and she decided against it. He had been pleasant enough to work for thus far, but he had also not been _kind_. She imagined, quite against her will, him draping his coat over her shoulders to warm her as she shivered from fright. She imagined him touching her arm to comfort her. She knew he wouldn’t.

Men always seemed to think that women were jumping at shadows, afraid of nothing. Brienne was not a woman who tended toward that kind of fear, and she would not have him think that she was.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she had convinced herself that it was a momentary folly. The shadows, and the oldness of the castle, and her silly thoughts about history could perhaps combine and induce even a woman as practical as her to imaginative nonsense.

The light under Jaime’s door was gone. Arya’s room was dark and quiet as well. A candle flickered under Sansa’s door, however, and Brienne hesitated. She felt an awkward sort of shame, lingering in the hallway like an intruder, but it was so late at night, and Brienne had just been thinking of her own torment as a child, when she would lay awake after nightmares, fearing shadows. Her governess had not been the sort of woman to whom Brienne could have run with her fears, and she wanted Sansa to know that Brienne _was_.

She stood before the door, and she raised her fist to knock. Before she could, Sansa began to speak. Her voice was low, conciliatory, like she was explaining something to someone. Almost a teaching voice. She was young, Sansa, but not so young that Brienne would expect her to be the kind of child who talked to herself in the night. She leaned closer to the door. She quieted the part of her mind that said it wasn’t right, and that she should not abuse Sansa’s trust. It was _for_ Sansa. She wanted to make sure that the girl was safe.

“…happy, I promise, mother. I don’t know why you’re so…” A heavy sigh. A rustling of bedcovers. Then silence. Brienne hesitated, but the candle still was lit, and so she knocked. There was a long pause before Sansa called for her to enter.

Sansa’s room was large, and overflowing with the kinds of frilly things she liked. She had a canopy bed, a large bed for a child, and it was draped with things that shimmered, like gauzy scarves and decorative ornaments. Brienne had thought of her own governess, the first time she saw the inside of Sansa’s room, and how Ms. Roelle would have told her to stop being such a silly brat and take those frills off her things. _It wasn’t proper_ , she would have argued. Maybe she would have been right. But Brienne had not yet found the heart to tell Sansa that she was, at least in the eyes of society, getting too old to fill her room with fripperies. Perhaps she never would.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Sansa seemed startled by the question, and she looked younger, and smaller, huddled in the center of the big bed, surrounded by blankets and stuffed animals like a much younger child. She was tugging at some thread on her bedcover, and she smiled, but it shook, and Brienne could see that she had been crying.

“Oh, yes, Miss Tarth,” she said, unconvincingly. “My finger caught on some of the embroidery, and I tore it loose. When I woke from a dream, I decided I needed to fix it. That’s all.”

Brienne nearly opened her mouth to tell Sansa that she had heard her speaking. Had heard her say _mother_. She didn’t.

“All right,” she said. Sansa’s finger was wound tightly in the thread now. It was turning vaguely purple. She stared at Brienne as if she was frightened of her. Brienne felt guilty, which was odd, and it stung. It brought her back to a moment she would rather forget. She had been young, and her father had arranged a visit from a boy not much older than her, hoping to make a marriage match. It hadn’t worked, obviously. He had looked at her with such…Not as if he hated her, or as if he thought she was so hideous. But briefly frightened. The hate came after. Like her father had insulted him by thinking the match possible. But that first moment, that first flicker of fear. Brienne was used to being taller and broader than most men, and over the years, she became used to it, but there was always a little bit of hurt that came with it, no matter how hard she tried to stop it. “You can fix it in the morning,” she managed. There was a lump in her throat that made her feel quite pathetic. “You should go to sleep.”

“Yes, of course, Miss Tarth,” Sansa said quickly. “You should as well.”

Brienne smiled at her charge, because the comment was concerned, and questioning, and so like a little lady. It reminded Brienne awfully of poor Catelyn.

* * *

She had not really thought to tell Jaime what happened in the night, but the next morning, she saw him emerging from the library, and the rare chance at conversation without the children present prompted her to speak. She asked for a moment of his time and he, bemused, led her in to his sanctuary. The first time she entered it, she had expected some signs of his general malaise to be imprinted on the room. The smell of old sweat and spilled alcohol, perhaps. Shards of glass. Broken bottles. But Jaime Lannister was apparently not the sort of man given to those kinds of dramatics; the room was kept in perfect order.

There was an oil painting of Catelyn and Ned Stark and their children over the fireplace, and Brienne had often wondered, and wondered again that morning, at Jaime's choice of rooms in which to spend the day drinking. Was that why he drank so much? Was he tormented by the fact that his wife had loved her first husband better? But that was a cruel thing to think, and Brienne was surprised at herself. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep making her so discomfited.

“I heard Sansa speaking in her room, late last night,” she said, and Jaime sighed, and sat down on one of the room’s couches, looking at her with a surprising awareness, given the early hour of the morning and the bleary way in which he had agreed to speak with her.

“And what were _you_ doing lurking in the corridor after dark, Miss Tarth?” he asked. On her first few days, his pointed questions and his amused way of speaking made her feel like she was doing something wrong. Now, she just knew that it was the way he spoke, but it always made her defensive.

“I was thirsty,” she said, perhaps a bit too defiantly. Jaime’s expression continued to be insultingly amused, and she wanted him to stop it. “I believe Sansa was speaking to her mother.”

_That_ did it, as she had expected it would. Jaime’s smile dropped, and it transformed quickly into a brutal, unforgiving frown. He looked at her as if she had said something cruel. But it was a fleeting thing, and it disappeared quickly. The amusement returned. He leaned back against the couch as if nothing had ever concerned him less.

“Of course she was,” he said. “Don’t you speak to _yours_ when you miss her?”

She stared at him, surprised by the question. She forgot her politeness entirely.

“How did you know my mother was dead?” she asked him, harshly. It was his turn to be taken aback.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I suppose I just assumed. _My_ mother has been dead a long time. Sometimes I forget not everyone had the same experience.”

He was drunk, she remembered. He was drunk, despite the early hour, and it brought back something of a sense of balance between them. She did wish, in a general way, that he didn’t drink so much, but his drinking made some things easier to explain, and easier to deal with. _He’s drunk_ , she could tell herself, and that would mean that nothing he said had to be taken too seriously.

Although, she supposed, even a drunkard could be right once in a while; perhaps Sansa woke from a nightmare and found it comforting to speak to her mother. There didn’t have to be anything wrong with that.

“I don’t speak with my mother,” she found herself saying. “Because I don’t see the point. But I can imagine how it might comfort her.” Jaime nodded, and he looked at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to dismiss herself, so she did.

Before she went, at the threshold, she turned back over her shoulder.

“Yes?” he asked, dryly sarcastic. There was already another glass of something in his hand, and she found it sad, suddenly. Terribly sad that he could be so loved by the girls and Pia and Ms. Donyse, and still he could not seem to pull himself out of this grief for the wife he had lost.

“Was Ms. Donyse at the house late last night?” she asked. Jaime frowned at her. Watched her carefully.

“No,” he said. “She left at the usual time. Why?”

He had this tendency to come back to himself at the worst moments, and this was one of them. There was a sudden sharpness in his gaze that made her wary to lie to him, and a perceptiveness that she was unused to seeing from him. Still, she could not bring herself to say it. It felt so silly, in the light of day.

“Just curious,” she said, and though Jaime seemed on the verge of calling her back and demanding an explanation, he did not, and he let her go.


	2. Chapter 2

Time passed, and Brienne learned to ignore the occasional snatches of one-sided conversation caught from behind the closed doors of the girls’ rooms in the night. Though she would not have admitted to being afraid, she was perhaps still unsettled from the non-event of the shadow that hadn’t been in the dining room, and that unease grew whenever she stepped out into the silence of the hallway, broken only by giggles and whispers from the children in their separate rooms. Brienne stopped her nightly wanderings, for a time, and told herself that it had nothing to do with fear or discomfort. In the day, the girls were well behaved, compliant, helpful little creatures. Even Arya, in all her wildness, was placated enough by Brienne’s fencing lessons that she was able to suffer through the rest of her schooling with good grace. Brienne loved teaching them, and she felt a care for them that had less to do with that lingering fondness for Catelyn and more to do with their natures, and the fact that they were so vulnerable and so oblivious to that vulnerability. Brienne had always had a protective streak.

So she left the children to their odd, nighttime ways. If their guardian wasn’t bothered by it, then she wouldn’t be either. She would continue to watch over them during the day, and she would continue to watch their guardian as well, noting the ways in which he was a failure and the ways in which she wished more fathers could be like him.

* * *

One of those second ways: Jaime began to accompany them on some trips to Wintertown, and she understood a little bit of the devotion he had earned. In Winterfell, he was harsh and cold and distracted, but in town, she found that the rumors she’d heard were true. Jaime Lannister was an indulgent stepfather, and away from Winterfell, he seemed almost an entirely different man. Like a man glutted on freedom after having spent years locked away. He was golden in the sunlight, glittering and sharp and beautiful, and Brienne found it hard to look at him. In Winterfell, as long as he remained oblivious, she _liked_ to look at him, the way a person could like to look at well made art even if they didn’t particularly care for the artist. At those dinners with the girls, she could almost understand the rapturous delight on Sansa’s face and the undying loyalty he’d earned from Pia. Not just because he was beautiful, but because he was thoughtful, and patient, and because he was kind in actions, if not always in words. She could see pieces of the man that he might have been before.

On the trips to Wintertown, she saw more and more. He was infectiously bright, clever, awake in a way he never was at Winterfell. It felt almost dangerous to look at him too closely, like she was going to see too much, or see him too well, and lose herself.

Sansa begged for embroidery thread, and fabric, and plain white clothing so she could improve it.

“How much would you like?” he asked.

Whatever colors she asked for, he bought. He laughed at the names of some of them, and teased her about them. Sansa hated to be mocked and made fun of; it was the source of most of the arguments between the sisters: Arya teasing and Sansa taking it too much to heart. But when Jaime teased her, she laughed, and mocked him in turn.

Brienne was the one who had to keep playing the part of dour old governess. _No_ , Sansa didn’t need so many colors. She still had plenty of thread at home to keep her busy. And _no_ , she didn’t need those new ribbons, either. Only enough to complete the dress she was working on. She didn’t need new needles, and she certainly didn’t need the expensive working desk that Jaime seemed on the verge of purchasing. Jaime laughed at her, but deferred to her, and Brienne bore the brunt of the blame for Sansa and Arya’s disappointed hopes as those outings wore on. She carried the guilt of that, and also the guilt of knowing that she wasn’t putting a stop to _enough_. Sansa still ended the days with too much, and on one memorable outing, Arya wound up with a _knife_ , despite Brienne’s best attempts to prevent it. Jaime allowed her to talk him down from _two_ knives _and_ a new, elaborately designed set of menswear for Arya’s romps in the gardens, but he threw in a new cloak and managed to somehow slip a bow and quiver past her, so he and Arya came away from that trip far more satisfied than Brienne.

The role of a governess was _not_ to stifle material indulgences from the parents of the children. Brienne knew that. But every governess she’d ever had was so _insistent_ on making sure that Brienne understood the way the world worked. Perhaps it was different with girls like Sansa and Arya, who were clever and well learned in addition to being beautiful children. Brienne had been slow to adapt to her lessons, and she had never been fortunate in her looks, and so maybe her governesses thought that they were doing her a kindness in making sure that she was at least prepared to go without. She’d hated it, being denied pretty things, and soft things, and gentleness, and kindness. But her governesses had only been teaching her the way society worked, and they were right. Technically, they were right.

Society frowned upon indulgence, and it frowned upon older girls in silly, frilly dresses, and it frowned upon girls of any age rolling about in mud and shooting arrows at trees. Brienne wanted to help them. She wanted to prepare them. But she wanted them to be _happy_ , too, and she had never before felt the conflict between love and duty the way she did with the Stark girls.

She felt the sting of failure every time they returned from those trips, even though the girls were red-cheeked and happy, and even though Jaime was the same. She just had this feeling, this bitter annoyance, this wish that she could be doing more to guide the girls, to help them grow up to be proper, well behaved ladies. But she was so easily pulled into the same traps as Jaime. Their pleading eyes and their quivering lower lips as they begged her. She remembered how well their mother had loved them, and she remembered that their mother was no longer with them, and she found herself caving. Perhaps part of the problem was that she wished her own father had thought to playfully negotiate with her governesses the way Jaime did for the girls. Her father was a kind man, and a good one, but he had always bowed before them. He hadn’t even tried.

“Whatever you think is best,” he had said, and Ms. Roelle had ruled the home with her iron will, and her cruelty, and she had done her very best to break Brienne.

(Perhaps that was unfair. She had done her very best to _prepare_ Brienne. It wasn’t _her_ fault that society believed what it believed about girls like her.)

When Brienne argued with Jaime, pointed out the lack of sense, pointed out that the children should not be so spoiled, he would laugh at her red face and her stern words, and he would say things like, “rap me over the knuckles for it if you must, Miss Tarth, but she’s getting at least _one_ knife, and since I hold the purse strings, you’re going to find it difficult to stop me.” Brienne never had the heart to try; Arya would light up, hopeful. Sansa would smile and plead. She was outmatched.

(Would Ms. Roelle have capitulated if her own father had done more than nod and give way? Would things have been different? Sometimes it haunted her, to think of how much her father failed where Jaime seemed to succeed, at least in this.)

The girls were sweet, and they loved her so fiercely. She _tried_ to deny them, because she convinced herself that in some ways it was for their own good, but nothing pleased her more than seeing their happiness, and so she slipped, and failed, and yet smiled for it. It felt like a rebellion, in a way. Remembering the things she wanted as a girl, and remembering how much it hurt her not to receive them. For the first time in her career, she found a kind of joy in flouting the rules.

She tried not to let it show. She wasn’t always successful. More than once, she caught Jaime grinning at her, knowing.

“Best to just let them have their way, Miss Tarth,” he said. “They’re little demons, aren’t they?”

But he said it with so much care, and affection, and he made the word _demons_ into an endearment, and Brienne _wanted_ to love the girls in that way. Wanted to indulge them. She understood why Jaime did it so often.

She always tried to dissuade them from buying _her_ any presents, but somehow, when they returned home, they always produced something. A beautiful blue dress, picked out by Jaime and Ms. Donyse when Brienne was busy chasing down Arya in the square and Sansa kept watch. A new set of paints that Arya managed to purchase without Brienne noticing, because she was distracted in pulling ribbons out of Sansa’s hands. Sturdy but elegant boots from Sansa, who said they would be much more comfortable for the long walks around the lake that Brienne liked to take in the afternoons. They indulged her as much as they indulged themselves, and everything in her training and in the way she had been raised told her that it was a mistake, but she could not disappoint them by turning down these signs of their affections. They gave her such useful, beautiful things, and they always had the right arguments designed to make her accept them.

Perhaps a better governess would rule the house with a stricter hand. Perhaps she would insist on temperance, and restraint, and a rigid adherence to the self-denial that society prized. But Brienne liked those trips so much, and she liked the version of Jaime that emerged during them. When those days were over, and the carriage drew closer to the gates around Winterfell, it was a bit like watching the sun go behind the clouds just before a storm. The coldness settled over him, like the way the fog settled over the lake in the mornings. The girls never seemed to mind, or even to notice, but to Brienne it felt awful, to see him remember himself. Remember whatever it was that made him so guilty, and so hurt, and so lost. No matter how happily the day had been spent, he would be drunk again before dinner.

* * *

This continued for a while. Weeks of it. Brienne later would wonder how long things had been escalating. She’d noticed Jaime’s high collared shirts, sometimes worn two or three days in a row, and she had noticed his discomfort when he sat down to dinner, and she had noticed the way he seemed distracted whenever she tried to engage him in conversation. He startled easily, too, especially when she tried to catch his attention from down the hall. But she did not think much of any of it. She had no idea why he did anything, or what it meant. He was just an incomprehensible man, and she rarely thought of him.

(Rarely, except when she dreamed of him, and they were often nearly violent dreams. Dreams of pushing him down on his back on one of those library couches and climbing atop him. Dreams of pushing him against a wall and burying her face in his hair while he squirmed back against her and told her _get it over with_ and _do it, I want you to_ , and she had no context for these dreams except that they left her unsettled, breathing shakily when she woke, with her gut clenching with guilt and desire.)

And then he started being late to dinner. Not every night, but often enough that she noticed it. He’d bustle in with frantic apologies about how he’d lost track of the time. Arya seemed not to bother herself with this new oddness, but Brienne caught Sansa more than once peeking up at Jaime with concern, and trying not to show it.

And then one night Brienne woke, in the dark, lying on her back.

A woman stood at the foot of her bed.

There was very little light to see her by. Just a stripe of moonlight that cut through the gap in the curtains. It sliced across the woman’s chest, and it gleamed, because the fabric of the woman’s dress was wet.

Brienne thought a number of things in very rapid, very frantic, very disordered succession. She thought that Sansa or Arya had made a mess. Decided to take a late night bath and then fell in, or decided to get a glass of water and somehow drenched themselves. She then thought that perhaps Ms. Donyse had come back, because the shape was too tall and too womanly to be either of the girls. She thought that a woman had wandered in from the snow. Got past the guards, and past the locked doors. Walked past Jaime’s room and chose Brienne’s. No. That was ridiculous.

Then, oddly, she thought of her mother. That final memory. Her mother had been abed, exhausted. In only a few hours, she would be dead, but Brienne had not known that, and sometimes she wished that she had. She had been young, and neither of her parents had wanted her to worry, but sometimes she thought that she would have preferred to know. To have those last moments with her mother while understanding that they _were_ the last moments.

She did not know why she thought of her mother. She did not know why she was thinking anything at all. There was a woman standing by the end of her bed, and still Brienne had not sat up and confronted her. She had not reached for the candle, or for the fire poker that she had been keeping beside her bed at night. She was not a meek, easily cowed thing, and this woman should not have been in her room. Why was she still in her bed?

That was when she discovered that she could not move. She could not speak. She could not even twitch her toes, or curl her fingers, or do anything but blink and stare at the figure at the end of the bed, swathed in shadow, lit only by a knife’s edge of light.

The figure stepped closer. Brienne wanted to scream. She could have sworn that she was, but no sound came out. Her mouth did not open. There was a tickle in her throat, like _something_ , some muscle trying to push the scream out. Perhaps a whimper, or maybe that was just the blood rushing in her ears. The figure moved around the bed, walking, one step. A pause. One step. A pause. Approaching the left side. Closer. There was a sound when she walked. What was it? Like her skirts were heavy. Like they were wet.

Still Brienne could not move, could only shift her eyes to follow the figure’s progress. And then she did not even _think_ of moving, because the figure stepped close enough that the cut of moonlight was across its face, and she could see that it was Catelyn.

Catelyn. But it was not Catelyn, too. Not the woman Brienne remembered.

Her hair was white, gray, only shot through in thin strands with the brilliant auburn it used to be. It was wet, dripping. So much water, like it was coming from within her, pooling around her. Her hair was a sodden mass that hung over her shoulder, gathered into the clumped remnants of the braid she always used to wear. She had been so beautiful, when Brienne knew her, but there was none of that beauty left. Her skin was pallid, blueish in the moonlight, gray, wrinkled and puffy like it had been left too long in water. Her lips were nearly white, and they were twisted in a snarl.

Her neck…

Her throat was cut. Bloodless, cold, like something frozen and not quite thawed again. Carved open. Brienne could see inside it. See cut muscle and tissue and bone, and it was so real, and so horrible, and she knew that she was not dreaming. She wanted to close her eyes, look away, but found that she could not. Physically, perhaps. But she was too afraid.

Catelyn took another step, and another. Her dress _was_ wet, and her skirt flopped loudly with every step. Sodden. Water poured off her as if she was emerging from a lake with every step. She was right up against the bed, then, beside where Brienne lay, still unmoving. Her breath was loud, ragged. Slower than Brienne’s. Less frantic. Brienne could hardly hear anything except Catelyn’s breath and her own heartbeat, thudding in her ears.

Catelyn bent over Brienne. Lower. Closer. Too close. Comically close. Brienne was sure that if she blinked, her eyelashes would brush against Catelyn’s pallid skin. She swore she could hear the creak of Catelyn’s bones as she bent. She could smell Catelyn’s rotten breath. Then Catelyn straightened, and she stared down at Brienne. There was judgement there. There was hatred, too. She was Catelyn, but she couldn’t be Catelyn. She couldn’t be the woman Brienne had known.

Catelyn raised her hand to her throat, and she covered it, clenched her fingers around it, as if holding it together enough to speak.

“Lannister,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. Her eyes burned into Brienne’s. It was a horrible sound, her broken voice. The effort in it. She hate. Brienne’s vision blurred. Her eyes filled with tears. She did not often cry, but she couldn’t help it. She would be sobbing if she could.

“Catelyn,” she managed to say, but the shade of her friend only stared at her. Glaring. _Waiting_. At last, Brienne felt her fingers begin to twitch, and she was able to move her arm, and she scrabbled back for the lamp beside her bed. She looked away only for a moment, only to make sure that her clumsy fingers found it the switch, but it was long enough. By the time she looked back, the room was flooded with light, and Catelyn was gone.

Brienne leaned over the edge of her bed. She thought that she would be sick. Her chest was heaving now that she could move. Her ears were ringing, like she had been struck. Bile rose in her throat, but as she blinked away her tears, she mastered herself, and she stared down at the floor. She told herself that she would not see anything, any sign of Catelyn’s visit, but the water was unmistakably there, a puddle on the floor. And the footsteps, leading across the room, leading to the door, those were unmistakable, too.

* * *

She did not know how she fell asleep after that, but she was tired, and afraid, and she curled up beneath the covers like a child, and she left the light on. She did not know, either, why she didn’t wake the house with her screams, or storm to Jaime’s room and tell him what she had seen. She didn’t even think about how the girls spoke to their mother at night. She was practical, she told herself. She was rational. It must have been a dream.

The water was gone in the morning, and so were the footsteps, and no one said anything at breakfast that made her think that they had seen anything or heard anything odd in the night. _It was a dream_ , she told herself. It was an easy thing to do. Dreams could be such strange, unexplained things. The fact that it was vivid…the fact that it was so terrifying…well. Maybe she should just start trying to get to sleep earlier. Maybe that was all it was.

Later, she would look back and feel how stupid she had been. But at the time, she could not be moved. What good would have come of it, anyway? Frightening herself with stories and shadows and a belief in something supernatural at work? It only would have frightened her, and perhaps she would have been unable to handle the rest.

* * *

Early in the afternoon, after their lessons, Sansa was struck by a whim to take a picnic lunch down to the lake, and Brienne agreed happily. She could do with an hour or so out of the house. The dream from the previous night had mostly faded, but it still lingered unpleasantly at certain moments, and she didn’t feel completely herself. The sun would help.

Arya agreed to the plan, because she always preferred being out of doors, and Brienne and Ms. Donyse went about packing the lunch. Sansa helped, always looking to be useful. When they had nearly finished with the sandwiches, Sansa directed them to add another to the basket and said, “Jaime’s going to come with us.”

Brienne was sure that would turn out to be wishful thinking on Sansa’s part, but to her surprise, Jaime _did_ agree to accompany them, though he seemed a bit reluctant when he heard they were walking all the way down to the lake. He was drunk, or drunk-ish, at least, but he _was_ astonishingly good at pretending he wasn’t, and he played his role admirably, if with the kind of slurred grandeur that told of his inebriation.

Arya ran ahead on the path down to the lake, yelling back at Brienne to keep up, promising to show her the best place to spread the blanket. Brienne lagged only a little behind, carrying the basket, while Jaime and Sansa followed at a more sedate pace, talking. Sansa was light and chatty and seemed to be in a cheerful mood, but each time Brienne glanced back to make sure they were all right, Jaime’s expression seemed darker, more tense, and then Brienne began to listen to Sansa’s words. They were disguised in idle chatter, but they didn’t match her tone at all.

“…not a stupid little girl anymore, and I know the difference,” she was saying pleasantly. Brienne slowed her walk so she could better listen.

“It isn’t like that, Sansa,” he replied. He didn’t bother to disguise his tone, but it was so low and quiet that Brienne almost didn’t hear him.

“She isn’t the same. I’m frightened of her.”

Jaime sighed, and Brienne nearly held her breath, wondering if Sansa spoke of _her_. That seemed unlikely, but who else?

(She did not think of Catelyn. That had been a dream. A _dream_.)

“You shouldn’t be. She has no reason to hurt anyone.” The sober patience in Jaime’s voice was undercut a bit by the way he listed to one side when he said it. Nearly stumbling. Catching himself. Sansa caught his arm to keep him steady.

“Except you,” she said. Her pleasant attitude vanished into anger. If Jaime replied, Brienne didn’t hear it; Arya shouted from up ahead, and Brienne knew she could not linger any longer, even if she desperately wanted to hear the rest.

* * *

It wasn’t that Brienne wasn’t clever enough to know what they were talking about, or to know that there was something going on. The figure in the dining room. The woman at the end of the bed. The way the girls laughed and played and spoke to their mother at night. Of course those things combined in her mind, twisted and formed a shape she didn’t like. It was just that it was easier to feel wounded by it. To tell herself that they were talking about _her_ , and that Sansa didn’t trust her, and that that was all.

She did, in a general way, understand. She’d read novels enough to formulate a very silly, very accurate idea of what was happening. It was just that she couldn’t believe it was true. It was one thing to read about ghosts and spirits and hauntings, and it was one thing to shiver in delight at the _idea_ of it being real. Brienne had never been the sort of person who lingered in fear, or delighted in it, but she could understand those who did. But there was a difference between finding entertainment in the breathlessness of fear of impossible things and _actually believing_ in those impossible things, and she refused to do the latter.

Instead, she blamed him.

_He must be filling their heads with nonsense_ , she decided. _Telling them that if they talk to their mother, she’ll be with them._ Well meaning, perhaps, but it allowed him to continue being neglectful, and Brienne could not feel charitable about it. And Sansa must have had the kind of imagination that could conjure spirits, and she had believed him too much, and now the idea of her mother’s ghost had frightened her.

Brienne’s own experience the night before was to be ignored and discarded, or explained away by her continued discomfort with the way the girls acted as if their mother was still there. The oddness of the house had infected her dreams, and that was his fault. It could all be blamed on Jaime.

(Jaime, who looked up at her with wanting in her dreams, and who writhed beneath her, and who begged her. Wanted her strong and powerful, not fettered and polite and carefully locked away behind layers and years of training to be a well behaved woman, a good governess, a proper lady. Jaime, who was a Lannister, who was to be hated, and scorned, for reasons Brienne could not quite articulate but could certainly feel. Jaime, who Brienne did not think about, because she would have to be mad to think about him with any softness. Mad, and broken, and the kind of woman she had not been raised to be.)

Men were always the monsters, in the end. Whether he meant to be a monster or no, Jaime had created the phantom of Catelyn, and he had planted it in Brienne’s mind as firmly as he had planted in in the minds of the girls, and he had gone too far.

(She wanted to…)

She would have to speak to him about it.

(…hold him down against the couch. Sneer in his face, growl in his ear.)

It couldn’t continue.

* * *

She watched Jaime and the children carefully during their picnic, but despite the oddness of his conversation with Sansa, a lightness settled over all of them. Sansa sat primly on the blanket and pointed out the beauty of everything around them. Jaime dozed, at one point, and teased Brienne when she tried to use the opportunity for a lecture about good manners, and reclined on the blanket looking

(sinful)

rumpled and exhausted and drunk. Always drunk.

Arya skipped rocks in the lake and returned to the blanket every so often to nibble on some food before bounding away again, excited to be out in the day. Jaime actually managed to pull himself upright long enough to help her improve her technique, and he was almost fatherly, then. Almost sober. He laughed at Arya when she accidentally flung the rock straight into the mud, and she nearly succeeded in pushing him in the lake, and he threw her over his shoulder and threatened to dunk her while she screeched and laughed. Sansa drew pretty sketches in the sketchbook in her lap, inexpertly capturing her sister and their guardian and Brienne and Robb and even the housekeeper and the Paynes, and Pia as well.

(But not Catelyn.)

Brienne watched, and she felt content, but wary, and tense, like something was seeping into her, past her defenses. Or like it _had_ been seeping into her, since perhaps this morning, or perhaps earlier, and she wasn’t sure how to make it stop.

Jaime sat down next to her, heavily enough that Brienne knew he was still not as sober as he seemed. He undid his tie, which had been sloppily tied in the first place, and he undid the first few buttons of his shirt. This one had leaves and vines embroidered around the collar, and his fingers shook as they fumbled with the buttons. Brienne felt a sudden pity, and she wished she had packed something for him to drink. She’d seen her father struggling with the effects of alcohol before. He’d drunk too much when Brienne’s mother died, and when he decided to stop, it had been difficult. It was a difficult thing to watch, too.

With the collar at last open, Jaime turned to say something to her, but his words died as he caught her eyeline. His hand went to his throat quickly, to hide the yellowing bruise he must have forgotten about, but she had already seen it.

A handprint. Five fingers, wrapped around his neck. The places where the fingertips would have pressed into his skin were more purple than the rest. Like someone had squeezed very hard. 

“Who did that to you?” she blurted. Sansa pretended not to be listening, but her pencil scribbled more quickly across the page. Arya shrieked about finding a leech, somewhere by the reeds.

“No one,” Jaime said quickly. He turned away from her, and he did the buttons back up. His fingers didn’t shake this time. Brienne had the impression of a man locking himself away again. Any trace of relaxation was gone. “Do not concern yourself.”

* * *

She didn’t _want_ the truth to be what she was sure it was. She wanted a simple, horrible explanation. Jaime had forced himself on someone, and they fought back. Perhaps Pia. Perhaps Ms. Donyse. She could not think that he would harm one of the girls. It was too horrible to contemplate.

(Was the truth really more horrible than that? More horrible than monstrousness?)

Brienne knew that she didn’t see everything that went on in the castle. There were whole hours in which she did not see Jaime at all, and he could have left the grounds at any time, and she would not have realized it as long as he was back for dinner. But the thought of him attacking someone was a difficult one. She did not quite trust him, but it was _like_ trust. She had never felt afraid of him. She’d been discomfited by plenty of the men she’d worked for over the years, but Jaime never gave her trouble, never asserted his authority in a way that made her want to flee. He was kind to the girls, and he had been indulgent towards her, and she liked him, and pitied him, and felt a kind of sympathetic disdain for his drunkenness that could not allow for fear. But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses, and she knew that one such weakness was for pretty men with sad eyes, and Jaime was certainly that.

(She was stronger than him. Maybe that was why she was unafraid. Even if he was sober, she thought that she might be stronger than him, and she was certainly stronger than him when he could barely stand straight. She was not supposed to be. She was not supposed to be strong at all. She was supposed to be weak, and meek, and feminine, and only in her dreams was she allowed to be what she wanted. But she _could_ be. She knew it. She could not acknowledge it, but she knew it.)

So was it really worse? The truth. Was it _really_ worse than believing that Jaime was a monster? Was the idea of a ghost really so terrible that it would not be a relief to know that Jaime had not so thoroughly fooled her?

She didn’t find any answers before bed, though she could not fall asleep for hours. And then she woke in the night, and she was afraid to open her eyes. Afraid to find that she would not be able to move again, and that she would see Catelyn standing above her.

She didn’t open her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from hearing it.

Ragged, pained breathing. Something wet, something waterlogged. Dripping. She knew that Catelyn stood at the foot of her bed, just as she had the night before. Had she been doing it every night? Brienne couldn’t say. She could move, however, and so she reached out, her eyes still squeezed shut, and she managed to turn on the light. When she opened her eyes, there was nothing.

She scrambled to the end of her bed, though she knew what she would see: the stain of water on the carpet. The wet footsteps leading to the door. It was a foolish thing, but she grabbed a candle anyway, and she lit it with fingers that shook, and she hurried to the door. She was dressed only in her nightgown, this hideous pink thing that she knew she looked ridiculous wearing, but she did not stop to think about it. She eased out into the hall, and she followed the footsteps.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she was surprised when she saw that the trail ended abruptly at Jaime’s door. It was shut, but the footsteps led clearly in, and Brienne didn’t know what to do. She held the candle in her hand. A useless enough weapon against a man, never mind a ghost. It was dark under Jaime’s door; no candlelight tonight. She could hear nothing from within. She should go back to sleep. She couldn’t convince herself tonight that it was a dream, but that didn’t mean there was anything she could do. Or _should_ do, even. But she pressed her ear against the door anyway, because she had gotten this far, and because she needed to know.

There was nothing, for a time. The span of a few heartbeats. She began to feel foolish again, for indulging herself. Her governess, Ms. Roelle, the worst of them, had beaten too many of the same lessons into Brienne: rationality. Logic. Practicality. Like she could squeeze Brienne into a small enough box to keep her from ever escaping it. Like she could build Brienne into a machine who felt nothing, who wanted nothing, and who could be of use, somehow. She was ashamed to have capitulated, to have believed even for a moment in the fantasy of a vengeful ghost. Even looking at the wet footprints on the ground, even seeing the evidence with her own eyes. Even with the memory of that horrible breathing.

Then, through the door. A rustling. Sheets. A few weak, odd thumps. And something else. A garbled sound. Choking? She thought of the bruised handprint on Jaime’s skin. She hated the thought of being wrong. Knocking on the door and interrupting something private. She would die of embarrassment, she thought. It was difficult enough to look at him when she knew what kind of filth her dreaming self was capable of. But her instincts were what they were, and she felt real dread. She remembered the way Jaime hid himself away again. Denied her the chance to protect him. She had to. She had to be sure. She knocked.

The choking ceased, and she could hear a ragged, coughing gasp, and she waited. She was sure that her face was very red, because it sounded…well. She had heard such sounds before, by accident, when she worked for the Baratheons, and the thought of interrupting Jaime at _that_ was more than she could take. She didn’t think about the fact that she was wearing only her nightgown. She didn’t think about her own sleep-tousled hair or her red cheeks or the fact that she was so undressed, and about to be standing before the most handsome man she’d ever seen. The man she dreamed about. If she had thought about any of those things, maybe she would have fled back to her room, but she didn’t.

A light, then, beneath his door, and then there were footsteps, and then he was opening it. His face was as red as her own felt, and haggard. More haggard than she had ever seen it. She knew he was quite a bit older than her, and for the first time he looked it. He ran a hand through his hair, and she saw that it trembled. His whole body trembled. His nightshirt was slightly open, and the bruise from the lake was still there, but now he was bleeding. His shirt had been torn at the shoulder, and there were red lines in his skin. She saw all of it, and she frowned, and he scrabbled at the fabric with one hand, trying to keep the pieces of it together. He looked terrible. Drawn, pale, with dark bruises under his eyes. Drunk, again, perhaps. Or drunk still. But terrible beyond that.

“Jaime,” she said, surprised into using his given name aloud, which she always tried very hard not to do.

“What is it?” he asked. He sounded angry to be interrupted, but she knew that he was afraid. She recognized it in him. The trembling. The way his eyes darted to behind her, around her, looking for trouble.

“I heard something,” she said. He frowned at her mightily.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “The guards…”

“You know I’m not talking about the guards.”

He was startled into silence at that, and then they stared at one another. He was defiant, waiting for her to say something, but she was patient, and he scrubbed his hand over his face. Paused with it there, like he needed to take a moment.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. He glared at her from behind his fingers, and tore his hand away from his face, and stood up straight.

“I’m fine,” he said. His voice was cold, remote. Disinterested. She would have believed it, only yesterday, but now she saw him better, and she didn’t. “I fell. That’s what you heard. I’m just a drunk, stumbling idiot, all right? Go back to bed.”

“She was in my room,” Brienne said. She felt a terror of being wrong, even now, but she knew she wasn’t. She knew exactly what she was saying, and she knew that she was right, and she did not let Jaime avoid her gaze. He seemed smaller, then. He was always smaller than her, but he had a presence like he was larger. Not now. He was smaller, confused. Addled. Not a clumsy drunk bastard, like he wanted her to think.

“Miss Tarth,” he said.

“I followed her footsteps here.”

She looked down at the ground, at the carpet, and Jaime looked down with her. She could tell, because he sucked in a gasp when he saw. He stepped closer to her, and she stepped back, and he looked back down the hall, to her room. She held her candle down by her side, and the light glimmered off the wetness there. The footsteps had not yet faded.

When she looked back up and met Jaime’s eyes, he was even paler, and he stood braced against the door, his knuckles white where he gripped the doorjamb.

“Mr. Lannister,” she said.

“Miss Tarth, you need to leave,” he said.

“I’m not going until you tell me…”

“Tomorrow,” he continued, as if she had not spoken. “You need to leave tomorrow. I’ll have a carriage sent up from the village.”

“No,” she said. She surprised him. His eyes narrowed in incomprehension. She surprised herself, too. “No, I will not go. I have done nothing to warrant being terminated.”

“No, but…”

“I have nowhere to go,” she said, simply. It was not really a lie, though it was also not entirely true. She would have to find lodgings, until she could find another position. It wasn’t impossible. She could not return home, with her father eager to marry her off to any man who would take her. She had no other possible houses lined up. She could find another job, but it would take some time, and she did not like being at the mercy of the market. The night and the fear and the fact of Jaime’s sudden smallness made her bold enough to say it.

“I will give you whatever references you need to...”

“I am not going to be frightened off by some…some _phantom_ ,” she sneered, and Jaime stared up at her. He was breathing heavily, and blood had by now started to seep into his shirt from the cuts on his chest. “Mr. Lannister, are the girls in danger?”

“No,” he said. “She…she would not hurt the girls.”

“Am _I_ in danger?” she asked. He shook his head, and he looked down at the ground, and he squeezed his eyes shut. _Guilt_ , she thought.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t…”

“Are _you_ in danger?”

He looked up at her. He blinked, several times, in rapid succession, and she did him the courtesy of pretending not to notice the sheen over his eyes.

“Go to bed, Miss Tarth,” he said at last. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

* * *

They did not talk about it in the morning. Instead, Ms. Donyse informed Brienne that she would be moved into another wing of the house, just around the corner from the girls’ rooms, but out of the family wing. She seemed concerned with how Brienne would take it, but Brienne knew exactly why she was being moved, and she only smiled and agreed. In the light of day, she was less afraid, and she was more concerned for him and the girls than for herself. Catelyn had stood at the foot of her bed and spoke the name _Lannister_. She was standing and watching Brienne another night, breathing. Maybe she had done it other nights, as well. She was, Brienne suspected, the figure that had sat innocently enough in the dining room.

That was all she had done.

Frightening, yes. Unsettling, undoubtedly. But she had not yet touched Brienne, or hurt her. Maybe she wouldn’t. But she was interacting with the girls, and she was clearly hurting Jaime, and Brienne was not the sort of person who could turn her back on that. They weren’t safe. It wasn’t her job, necessarily. She had not been hired as a protector. But she would protect them all the same.

Catelyn did not appear at the foot of Brienne’s bed again. Brienne woke, sometimes, and sometimes she was even brave enough to look, but her room was always empty. She had a lovely view of the lake, and with the moonlight shining off the water, her room was almost well-lit, and she never saw any wet footprints by her bed. Some nights, she slept through the night. Most nights, she dreamed. They were violent, or soft, or longing, or desperate, but almost always they involved Jaime. Harsh and unforgiving or warm and wanting. In her waking moments, she could ignore him well enough. Whole days passed when she did not speak to him at all, and she woke guiltily on those nights, aching, wanting, hating herself for it. Sometimes fearing herself for it, too. She did not know what to call it but madness. Or a fever, perhaps. She would close her eyes and remember her teachings and remember herself. _Brienne Tarth, governess._ That was her. That was all she was.

But she would dream, and she would forget herself.

If Catelyn’s ghost had decided to leave Brienne alone, it seemed she had not afforded Jaime the same courtesy. He emerged less often from his library, and even Sansa wasn’t able to coax him on any more outings. He sent Brienne and the girls to the village without him, and some nights he even missed dinner. Sansa fretted silently about it, and Arya attacked her meals with more vigor, but neither of them said anything of their concern to Brienne, and Brienne did not know how to bring it up to them. Every time she tried to speak with Jaime about what they had seen, she was rebuffed, and turned away, until she stopped seeking him out. Once, she bumped into him in the hall when he was on his way up to bed from the library, and he flinched when she grabbed his arm to steady him.

“Mr. Lannister,” she said, warning, and he flinched again, and waved her away. It was the most they had interacted since that night in his room.

She worried for him. She worried for the girls more, because the girls were her charges, but she worried about Jaime as well. He did not seem like he had any will to help himself, and that made her worry more. There was a resignation to him that concerned her, and a vagueness behind his eyes, like he was never truly looking at anything. Drunk, yes, perhaps. She would have believed that that was all it was, once, but she didn’t think so anymore.

And it was difficult not to worry when Sansa was worried, too. She asked after him often, and though she tried to hide her concern, it was impossible. Pia was the only person who seemed to speak to him regularly, and even her bright and cheerful demeanor wasn’t enough to hide the fact that _she_ was growing more concerned as well.

Her worry ate away at her. It distracted her from her lessons with the girls. It bit into the peaceful moments when she took her walks by the lake or curled up somewhere sunny with a book. It followed her into her dreams. She grew stronger in them. She hated Jaime for making her worry. She dragged him out of the house to save him, shouted at him, pressed her fingers into his throat, not enough to choke him, but enough to show him that she could. She was not a cruel woman, or a harsh woman. Not in life. But in her dreams, it was like she was someone else. Someone who claimed, and took, and took, and took. She faced down spirits and faceless men with a sword in her hands and a song in her blood. She ripped the castle apart with her bare hands, and she bled, and she did not care. The pain was nothing to her. She saved everyone she loved, and she killed the ones she hated, and in the mornings, when she was awake, she would teach the girls a lesson about history. Something sweet and soft and appropriate for ladies. She would read a pleasant book about women becoming friends despite a difference in class. She would sleep. She would dream of Jaime, his head beneath her skirts. She would dream of screaming hoarse hatred and throwing herself into a fight. She would dream of wrapping Jaime up in her arms. Safe, safe. What was it, if not madness?

She was certain now that the shade Catelyn Stark in her room had _not_ been a dream, because her true dreams were so uncertain, and so vague. In her sweeter dreams, the ones she liked and was not frightened of, she was protecting the castle. She was a storied knight, with a sword, and she was strong. No one could touch the girls. No one could harm Jaime. Pia and Donyse and the Paynes and everyone on the grounds were safe from anything that would harm them, because Brienne was there to protect them. In her dreams, Jaime kissed her when she saved him. In her dreams, the girls hugged her around the waist and called her a hero. They were brilliant, shining creatures, and their words were so simple, and so adoring. Those dreams were silly and pathetic and telling, and they always made her sad when she woke, for the simple fact that they _were_ dreams, and that there was something in her mind, in her subconscious, telling her that she needed them.

“Have either of you seen anything odd?” she asked the girls once, at dinner. Jaime had not joined them for three days.

Arya looked down at her food and cut at it more harshly with her knife. Sansa shook her head.

“Just mother,” Arya muttered. Her knife screeched against the plate; she had cut through her meat, but still she did not stop.

“Arya,” Sansa snapped. Arya frowned and kept cutting. “Arya, _stop_ it!”

Arya flung the knife down against the plate, and she glared poisonously at Sansa before storming out. Brienne tried to get Sansa to talk about what Arya had said, but Sansa managed to politely refuse every attempt, and when she asked to be excused, Brienne could see no reason why she should not be.

That night, she dreamed again, but for the first time, she dreamed of Catelyn. In her room, sitting on the end of Brienne’s bed. Brienne knew that it was a dream, because the light outside was too bright. The moon too large. The entire lake was white with the reflection, white and roiling like the ocean around Tarth. Catelyn stared at it with a hunger in her eyes. Blood ran from the wound on her neck, and it spilled over her fingers as one hand clamped there, against her throat.

“Catelyn,” Brienne breathed, and Catelyn looked over at her. In an instant, the gray hair was gone. The blood was gone. She was no longer waterlogged and stained. She was blurry, almost. Like Brienne was looking at her through smudged glass, but she was beautiful, and she was all herself.

“Brienne,” she said, and her voice was just as Brienne remembered, and nothing like the horrifying rasp it had been when she said _Lannister._

“Why are you here?” Brienne managed to ask. Her voice trembled and shook with fear, but it was _Catelyn_ , and she knew that she did not have to be afraid.

“Why am I here?” Catelyn asked. She spoke the words like she’d never heard them before. Like she didn’t understand the very concept of the question. Brienne’s throat felt tight. She was being strangled.

But there was nothing on her. Nothing touching her. She was just afraid. She had never been afraid like this before. Catelyn was just the same as she always had been, and there was nothing about her that was frightening, but that was the part that so scared Brienne; she did not want to watch Catelyn turn back.

“Catelyn,” she said, and Catelyn stood, and she moved to the window. Her back was to Brienne. Still blurry.

“The girls,” she said.

“I’m with them,” Brienne said. “I’ll protect them.” Catelyn’s shoulders shook with what looked like sobs, though there was no sound. “I promise, Catelyn.”

“Promise,” Catelyn echoed.

“I swear it,” Brienne said. “I swear to you.”

“I’m not here,” Catelyn replied. “Not always. It isn’t me.”

She turned, and her form shuddered, and grew sharper, and suddenly she was so real that Brienne was sure that if she put out her hand, she would feel flesh, and warmth. She couldn’t. She couldn’t move. Catelyn stood right in front of Brienne, up against the side of the bed. She was too close. Too real.

“Catelyn,” Brienne said again.

“It isn’t me,” Catelyn replied. She bent over the bed. Her eyes met Brienne’s. The urgency in her tone seemed to shake the entire room. “Tell him. It isn’t _me_.”

* * *

Brienne did not believe in ghosts. She would tell herself that when she lay awake before bed. She would tell herself that when she woke in the middle of the night from dreams that clung and tried to drag her down. She would tell it to herself when she thought about the shadows under Jaime’s eyes and when she noticed that he was losing weight and when she heard giggling coming from Arya’s room and when she heard quiet sobs from Sansa’s. _I do not believe in ghosts_. She still did not, not generally. But she would be a fool not to believe in this one.

* * *

She entered the library without knocking. Jaime was slumped in a chair by the fire, asleep, but he jolted awake when she entered. A half-empty bottle smashed on the floor, and he swore at her violently as he staggered to his feet.

“The children?” he asked, and she shook her head and shut the door behind her. Jaime sank back into his chair, looking murderous.

“You’d better have good reason for this, then,” he said.

“I do. She’s getting stronger, isn’t she? Sansa’s terrified. Arya withdraws deeper into herself every day. And you…”

“I?” Jaime asked, disdainful.

“You look awful,” Brienne replied, and Jaime laughed. It was a rueful, brutal kind of laugh, but there was real amusement there. He stood again, and stepped over the broken glass, and he moved toward her. Oddly languid, for a man who seemed to stumble everywhere he went.

“Do I?” he asked. There was something taunting in his expression that she hated. _No_ , she thought. _You don’t_. But Jaime could not have known that she dreamed of him at night, nor that she thought there was nothing she would like to do so much as shove him against a wall and kiss him senseless, half punishment for him and half reward for herself for putting up with him.

“Yes,” she said. He snorted, like he didn’t believe her. “Clearly you haven’t bothered to look in a mirror lately.” He snorted again, waving her off, veering around her and heading to the liquor cabinet against the back wall. She knew from Ms. Donyse that he was getting deliveries from the Paynes, but she hadn’t realized just how many bottles were stacked in it. “Your plan is to drink yourself to death, then?”

“No,” he said, but he didn’t offer any other information. She felt frustration bubbling up within her. She wanted to scream. She didn’t.

“The girls are frightened.”

“ _You_ are frightened, I think.”

“Of course I am!” He seemed surprised to hear her admit it, and he turned to look at her. His drunken confusion was too much. She stormed toward him. She crushed pieces of the broken glass beneath her heels. He drew himself up, shocked by her anger, and that only made her angrier. She tore the bottle out of his hands. He gaped at her, and she shoved him against the cabinet when he tried to take it back. She kept her hand on his chest, just below his neck, and she pushed him harder. The bottles inside the cabinet rattled. She knew it hurt him. He flinched. She felt him swallow reflexively, his throat jumping under her hand. It was like her dream, with Catelyn so close, and so real. He was too real, now. Realer than she’d expected. But she could not stand here and watch it any longer. “When I was younger,” she said, calmly, gripping the bottle in her free hand like she meant to bludgeon him with it. “I used to stay up at night, convinced that my mother’s ghost would visit me, and that I would miss her if I slept. But I think, if I _had_ seen her, I would have been…it would have been _terrifying_. I have seen Catelyn, Jaime. At the foot of my bed. She is not your wife any longer. She is not their mother.”

“They don’t see her the same way we do,” Jaime said. He wasn’t fighting her. He was so resigned. Resigned to everything, yes. That was what the problem was. He never fought, or tried. He allowed it to happen. Allowed himself to be haunted. Why wasn’t he fighting? It made her want to shove him harder, grab at his throat and throttle him the way his wife did. She didn’t.

“Does that matter?” she asked. “Does it matter what she looks like? She’s still _dead_ , Jaime.”

“She’s their mother,” Jaime snapped. Brienne shook her head, and she released him, backing away, still carrying the bottle with her. She wanted, for a moment, to fling it at the wall. Watch it shatter. She didn’t. She never did these things she wanted to do, because she had been well trained, as a girl, to keep everything inside. But it _was_ inside. It sat there, building. Hurting. She felt like she could break the bottle with her fist, if she clenched it hard enough. “You should go,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“I could give you a month’s pay.”

“Mr. Lannister.”

“ _Jaime._ Two months, if that’s what you need. You aren’t safe here.”

“ _Why_ am I not safe here? What is she doing?”

Jaime shook his head.

“You won’t go. I don’t know why I bother.”

“I won’t,” she agreed.

“You should.”

“Why is she still here, Jaime?”

“You should lock your doors at night, at least.”

“Do you really think that’s going to stop her?”

He looked up at her, and he stepped closer, and for a moment, she understood that he could be a danger. She was not a perfect judge. She knew that too well. She had been so wrong about people in the past. And Jaime…he was an attractive man, and he looked to be in distress, and that had softened her to him, but she should not be so blinded. A man in distress could still be a dangerous one.

“Nothing will stop her,” he said. “But maybe it’ll help you sleep. You aren’t looking so fresh yourself.”

She stepped back from him, and maybe it was the rapidity of it that made him laugh. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh, or a truly amused one. It was bitter, and harsh. He looked like a man who had just realized how afraid he was making her. He waved her away, went back over to the liquor cabinet. He picked another bottle, pointedly, a visual reminder that her tantrum had changed nothing. There were other bottles, and he knew she would not break all of them.

“Did you kill her?” she asked.

Jaime flinched, and he spilled the liquid he was pouring. He looked at her, saw her stance, saw the way she held her bottle like a weapon. He smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “Now let her get on with taking her revenge, would you? And mind the children.”

He brushed past her, close enough that she could smell what was in his glass. He didn’t look at her. He left the library, and she did not know where he was headed. His room, perhaps. She felt a strong urge to uncork the bottle in her hand and have a drink herself, but she would not give in. She felt a strong urge to smash every single bottle. Upend the entire cabinet and send them skittering across the floor.

She didn’t.

She placed the bottle back where it belonged, and she swept up the broken glass by Jaime’s chair. She looked up at the painting of the Starks over the mantle. Catelyn stared down at Brienne, as beautiful as she had ever been. It made Brienne think of her own red face, and how beastly her fury could make her, and how she probably looked half mad to Jaime.

Not that it mattered. He looked half mad to her as well.

* * *

Brienne knew little of the marriage between Jaime and Catelyn. She knew that it was not very long, and that it ended in Catelyn’s death. She knew that Jaime spent most of his day gazing at that painting, and she knew that he never spoke about Catelyn when he could help it. Actually, no one seemed to talk much about her, unless Brienne was the one to bring her up, and even then, they moved the conversation along quickly. Even the girls didn’t like to talk about their mother. They mentioned their father, they talked about their brother. They talked about happier times when their parents were still alive, but those happier times were always general things. Sometimes they would invoke their mother’s name, but it was always quickly skipped over, never lingered on. Like they were afraid to draw her attention. Like they were afraid of _her_.

Brienne could not understand what Jaime thought he was doing, in keeping them all living in this place where Catelyn’s ghost roamed the halls. Perhaps it was something as simple as loving her too much to let go of her, but Brienne could not excuse it. He told her that Catelyn would not hurt the children, but the children were afraid. They were afraid for him, too, she could tell. Arya was more difficult to read, because Arya was quiet, and withdrawn, and grew more so as they days passed. But Sansa wore her worry openly. She complained of cold, and she embroidered long into the night, like she thought it was some protection. Brienne often had to tell her to turn out the lights and go to bed, but if she were brave enough to slip into the hallway to check later, she would most nights see the candlelight still under Sansa’s door, and if she listened, she would hear the quiet sounds of a thread moving in and out of fabric.

The days passed in much this way. Jaime avoided her. She never saw him anymore. He never came to dinner. Sansa began to burst into tears for no reason, and Arya was prone to fits of anger. When Brienne tried to adjust Arya’s stance one time during a fencing lesson, Arya lashed out, and her fingernails left long, angry lines on Brienne’s face. She had bitten them until they were sharp, and jagged, and used them as a weapon. She cried, then, flinging her arms around Brienne’s neck and apologizing, and then she took herself off to her room and refused to come down for dinner. In the morning, Jaime saw Brienne as he exited the library, and for once he did not move in the opposite direction. He watched her approach, and she saw that he was pale, and she saw that his eyes lingered on her face.

“Arya,” she said, and she could not tell if he was more relieved or more sickened by the revelation.

“I’m sorry. I’ll speak to her.”

“I already have,” Brienne said, and her disdain was enough, apparently, to keep Jaime quiet. He watched her go.

Days passed. Nights passed. She never saw Catelyn. She never heard breathing at the end of her bed. Her removal to another part of the house seemed to have done away with that. When she walked the halls at night, she always expected…but she never saw her. Never saw water, or footprints, or shadows she could not explain. Never heard Jaime choking in his sleep, though she listened sometimes, long enough and frequently enough to feel mad. She felt as if the entire house was engaged in an elaborate play in which the majority of the action took place behind the scenes. She knew that things were happening. She knew that they were terrible, and frightening. She knew that something had to burst soon, because there did not seem to be any way around it. Ignoring it was not making it better, and it _would_ not make it better. But she saw none of it, and she heard none of it. She grew more erratic, and she knew that she was making a spectacle of herself. When she heard Arya giggling in her room on one of her nightly walks, she burst through the door without knocking, and she found Arya standing at the window, in the dark, alarmed and startled and embarrassed to be caught. There were no ghosts in her room. There was no water on the floor. Of course there wasn’t.

“Who were you laughing with?” Brienne demanded. She felt as if she was losing her grip, but she would not let Arya see it.

“Mother,” Arya replied. She was fierce, and unapologetic. Her tone asked: _what are you going to do about it_?

Nothing, it turned out. There was nothing she could do. She would have to find a way to get through to Jaime. He was the only one who could give the order to remove the girls from this place, and he didn’t seem inclined to do so.

* * *

When she lay awake in her bed, after her nightly patrols, she would think about what he had said. _Yes_. Yes, he’d killed her.

She wondered how. It was so difficult to get any information about deaths like Catelyn’s, because polite society didn’t want to ask those questions, and they didn’t want to know those answers. There were people who were curious, but you had to be curious quietly, and you had to make sure not to ask someone who would be genuinely offended. Everyone spoke _around_ things, and they spoke so delicately, and all that Brienne knew for sure was that people believed that Catelyn had taken her own life.

She could not believe that Jaime would have killed her. So many hours in that library, staring up at her portrait. So much time and effort and money going into keeping the girls happy. The way he came alive when he was away from the house, away from the ghost that followed him, and was someone else entirely. Someone who loved the children, indulged them, gave them whatever they wanted because he knew he didn’t have long before they were back in the house and he was back to his old habits. Drinking. Staring at the portrait. What was he even doing? Dulling the pain? The guilt? The shame? What was he hiding from? Even his refusal to save himself, his refusal to leave the castle and remove the girls to some safer place. It spoke of guilt, yes, but it did not speak of murder. Not to her.

He said he had killed her. Maybe that was true, or at least what he believed. Maybe something he did when she was alive led her to her death. Maybe he felt that he didn’t do enough. But he would not have said that he had killed her if he _had_. He wanted Brienne to hate him. He wanted her to leave him to his fate. He wanted her to hate him, not pity him. That was why he said it. She felt like a fool for having so much trust in him, but maybe it wasn’t even trust. Maybe it was understanding. Maybe she was right.


	3. Chapter 3

The last night started like a normal night. She put the girls to bed. She kissed them on their foreheads, the way they liked, though Arya always wiped it off afterward and said “yuck” with a smile.

She closed their doors. She retreated to her own room. She did not see or hear Jaime at all. She barely thought of him. She undressed. She put on her nightgown, and then her dressing gown. She sat in bed, and she read some book she had taken from the library, and she waited.

Hours ticked by. She grew tired. She got out of bed. She went back down the hall. She pressed her ear against their doors, one by one. She listened. Arya was not laughing or whispering. Sansa was not sewing, or crying, or whispering admonitions to her mother’s ghost. Jaime didn’t make a sound. The house was still, and for some reason that was worse. It felt too full, too pointed a silence. Like quiet before a storm.

She turned into her hall, to go back to her room. She was tired enough that she thought she might be able to sleep without fear. The silence still weighed on her, and she felt like she had forgotten to do something, or had missed something. She looked back over her shoulder, but there was nothing there. She faced front again.

At the end of the hall, there was a woman. Shrouded in darkness. Little more than a shadow.

Brienne had barely laid eyes on her before the woman was striding away, down the intersecting hall at the end, leading into the servants’ quarters. Brienne tightened the sash on her dressing gown, and she kicked off her slippers, and she ran.

She followed the hall, turned at the end, and caught fleeting sight of the woman making another turn. Their path wound together through the castle. Brienne had long since learned the layout of the castle, which had been so incomprehensible on her first days, and she knew exactly where she was, but everything felt different in the dark, and in the silence. Hallways felt longer, or shorter, than they should have been. Her footsteps made almost no sound, and the woman in the hall ahead made none at all. There was no one in this enormous castle except for her and the girls and Jaime, and this ghost. This shade. Where was it leading her?

Brienne thought, perhaps, that it was leading her to answers.

She made a final turn, down a flight of stairs, and at the bottom she found a closed door. Blank. Unobtrusive. A store room. She opened it, hardly knowing what to expect, and found Sansa and Arya, huddled on the floor, their arms around each other. They were in their pajamas. They were shivering.

“What?” she asked. She was out of breath from chasing the figure, and she was angry, and tired, and confused, and she wanted to go home, suddenly. She wondered if Sansa was tall enough to make the shape of the figure that Brienne had followed. Was it a trick? Some prank? “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Sansa stammered, surprised and frightened. Her skin was pale. This room was cold, as if there was a draft. Only Arya seemed unsurprised by anything, and she glared up at Brienne defiantly, held in her sister’s arms.

“Mother told us to come,” she said.

“Arya,” Sansa shushed.

“Why?” Brienne asked.

“He’s alone,” Sansa said. Arya was the one to try and shush her now, but Sansa would not be stopped. “She brought you here too, didn’t she?”

Brienne hesitated, one foot inching backwards. She thought of Jaime choking in the night. She thought of the bruises, and the scratches, and of Jaime’s poorly hidden fear. Could a ghost kill a man? It seemed absurd. She felt absurd for even considering it. But…to lure the girls and herself away. There had to be a reason for it. Unless he was at this very moment being led down the winding hallways to join them, but that seemed unlikely, and Brienne remembered the way he looked at her when she asked him if he had killed his wife. Empty. Accepting.

“She won’t hurt us,” Sansa said. “But Jaime…”

Brienne nodded. She backed up further. She could hardly believe herself. Leaving the girls unprotected. Leaving them undefended. How could she? What if she and Sansa were wrong?

But she ran, because she knew they were right. She stubbed her toe on the stairs, and nearly twisted her ankle when she missed a step. She slammed into a hall table, and she staggered and nearly fell up a flight of stairs. She had never been so frantic, she didn’t think. She was shocked by how afraid she was, because it still didn’t seem quite real. She still felt like she was living in a dream. Maybe it _was_ a dream. Another dream. Maybe she had lost her mind.

She was in her own hallway when she began to smell the smoke. She shed her dressing gown, leaving only her hideous pink nightdress, and she ran the rest of the way, faster than she had since she was a girl. It was so easy to shed those unwanted shackles. She had been so sure that they had been melded into her flesh, taught too well and too sternly to ever fade, but it was easy, when she was pushed. When it mattered. All those lessons about being ladylike, never running, walking quietly, never making much noise or looking to be in much of a hurry. Proper. Being proper. Never showing strength. Never _having_ strength. Never wanting, or needing, or desiring. It was freeing, for a moment. Her full strength. Freeing the way it had been when she was a girl. Freeing like when she pushed Jaime back against the liquor cabinet and stole the bottle from his hands. Freeing like those dreams when she pinned him against a wall and kissed him because she wanted him, and because she knew that he wanted her, too.

She was strong. She _was_ strong. Ms. Roelle had trained her out of showing that strength, but she had never been able to _take_ it from Brienne, and Brienne was _glad._

There was smoke oozing out from under Jaime’s door. She forgot every lesson Ms. Roelle had ever taught her, and she reached for the doorknob. She didn’t knock. She didn’t dither. A man’s bedroom in the middle of the night. Who fucking cared about that? Brienne didn’t.

But it was locked.

She slammed her shoulder into it. Once, and then again, twisting the knob, putting her strength into it. The door splintered open, and she staggered in past the smoke that swept out into the hallway.

Jaime was against the wall on the far side of the room. The fire raged up it, on the curtains, curling the wallpaper. The smoke was tremendous, roiling and moving and alive, like some monstrous thing. Brienne could see faces in it, could sense some malevolent hate, but she would never know if that was true, or if it was just something that her brain invented in her fear and in a need for answers. Jaime had not noticed her enter. His shirt was torn and bloody, with long claw marks down his back, and he was busy tearing down the curtains that had caught fire. They were wrapped around his arm, like a living thing. He was screaming. He flung them into the fireplace. His arm still burned. The sleeve of his shirt. Brienne ran to him. She grabbed the blanket off the bed. It was wet on one side, like a wet body had lain there. She threw it over him, smothering the flames.

She grabbed him by the shoulders. She pushed him, blind and stumbling, out into the hallway, still half-wrapped in the blanket, and she stormed back in to put out the rest of the fire.

But the fire was gone.

The smoke lingered, but it no longer roiled, only lightly misted throughout the room.

The charred curtains were still in the fireplace, but they were sodden, wet, like someone had drenched the entire room in water in the mere moments in which Brienne had her back turned. Water was everywhere, now that she knew to look. It dripped down the walls. It covered the carpet. The mattress. She took a single step into the room, and her bare foot sank into the rug.

She did not want to think about it, or look at it, any longer. She turned her back again, and she closed the door as best as she could. It was nearly hanging off its hinges. She had done that.

Sansa and Arya were running down the hall towards them. Jaime was coughing, cradling his right arm to his chest. It was burned, she could see, but he kept it tucked away and hidden as the girls reached him, as Sansa hugged him and sobbed. Brienne was angry. She couldn’t even articulate why. She couldn’t articulate anything. 

“Downstairs,” she said to them. She wanted to order them out of the house. Drive them away from it. Take them all by the hand and lead them to safety. She didn’t. She would be calm. Practical. A proper governess, and a proper lady.

(A proper lady would not have slammed open the door with that force. A proper lady would not have bodily hauled Jaime from that room. A proper lady would not dream of the things she dreamed of. Had she ever been a proper lady? Or had she only been fooling herself?)

She didn’t feel very practical now. Nor did she feel very sturdy. She felt like a wild creature that had been only half allowed to run free, and she wanted to run freer and farther. She wanted to tear this castle apart with her fingernails. She picked up her dressing gown in the hallway, and she tied it around herself, feeling exposed, half naked in her nightdress. The girls led the way, scampering down the stairs as if eager to get way from the smell of smoke. Jaime followed, still with his burned hand clamped under his armpit. Brienne took control, and Jaime said not a word of protest. He was pale with pain and shock, and he had no energy, where Brienne was bursting with it.

She put the girls to bed in the library, on the soft couches within. She covered them with blankets and told them to try to sleep. They both looked up at her with wide, beseeching eyes. She didn’t tell them _we’ll be leaving tomorrow_ , but that was only because she was afraid to say it aloud. She didn’t know what was listening, and she was a little afraid that this certainty, this strength, would not last, anyway.

When the girls were as settled as they were going to be, Brienne took Jaime gently by the arm, and she led him to the kitchen. He was almost meek. He smelled of alcohol and smoke. “Take off your shirt,” she told him, and he said nothing lewd or teasing at all. He didn’t even smile at her in that smug way he had.

He tried to untie the laces on his nightshirt, but he couldn’t manage it with one hand, so she helped him, pushing his fingers aside. He looked up at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. She didn’t know why she was so afraid of it, but she was. When the laces were undone, Jaime could pull it over his head, leaving only the trousers he had been wearing for at least the last three days. He must have fallen asleep in them. Passed out in them, more likely.

If not for the fact that the girls and herself had been led out of that wing of the house by the spirit, Brienne could maybe excuse the fire as a drunk falling asleep with a candle burning. Perhaps it fell onto the curtains, and perhaps that started the fire. But she was long past those justifications. Yes, Jaime was a mess, but she knew why, and she knew that she had to put a stop to this. If he insisted on martyring himself, there was nothing she could do to stop him, but she would not sit by and allow the girls to witness it. They would leave in the morning. He would not be able to stop her. He could have her arrested, he could destroy her reputation. It wouldn’t matter. She would make sure the girls were safe, first. The only question was whether he would consent to go with them. 

When Brienne took his arm and moved him to stand by the sink, he allowed her. Followed her. Did not complain, or tease, or resist. He shivered when her fingers wrapped around his wrist, but that was all. When she took gentle hold of his burned arm, from where it had been tucked against his side, he flinched, but he did not stop her. In the light, in the kitchen, everything was so much more real than it had been during the fire. She could not help but flinch as she saw how far up his arms the burns traveled. It looked awful, and painful, and Jaime looked so bewildered by it, and he cringed every time she touched it, no matter how gently.

“We should send for the doctor,” she said.

“Not at this time of night,” he replied. She didn’t argue, though she felt her brow furrow and she swallowed down a mighty impulse to scowl at him and call him a fool. She felt scooped hollow. She wrapped his arm in a wet towel. She made him sit at the table so she could hurry to the bathroom and retrieve the small first aid kit beneath the sink there. She could not help but glance in the mirror as she did. She looked absurd, red-faced and sweating. Wearing that hideous pink nightgown. Her hair had crisped at the ends, destroyed in the heat, and it looked frazzled and helpless. She wanted to chop it all off. She wanted to smash the mirror to pieces. She returned to the kitchen instead.

Jaime was sitting where she had left him, his arm outstretched across the table, as if he was reaching for her. His head rested in his other hand, propped up on his elbow on the table, and he looked tired. Not like a man who had been without a night of sleep, but something more than that, and something deeper. He looked like a man who had forgotten that sleep could be peaceful. Even when he had looked vulnerable to her in the past, there was always something guarded and wounded keeping her from seeing it completely. But now he had been sapped of the strength to keep up that façade.

She sat down on the edge of the table, and she lifted his hand into her lap. He looked up at her. His shoulders were hunched. He seemed defensive, like a startled, beaten creature.

“I have half a mind to pack up the children and take them out of here tonight,” she said as she began to clean the wound. Jaime paled and winced and breathed out harshly from time to time, but that was all he did. He made no other noise of pain. He kept his eyes closed. “I know I wouldn’t get far,” she continued. “But it’s the right thing to do.”

“The children are safe from her, no matter where they are,” Jaime said. Brienne jabbed a bit harder with the cloth than she really needed to, which drew his gaze so she could glare at him. She hated him. Hated him for being sad and pathetic and lost. Hated him for not realizing what was happening. Hated him for being a figure of pity, for inducing her to _care_. She was used to caring for children. She was used to caring _about_ children. She was not used to those protective instincts cropping up for people like Jaime, and yet she could not turn it off, and she hated him for it.

“She almost burned the castle,” she said. Jaime shook his head. He looked away, down at the ground, and he clenched his jaw. He was trying to avoid her gaze, but his hand still was held limply in Brienne’s, and she could feel the tension in him even there, even from those small points of contact.

“She wouldn’t have,” he said. “She wouldn’t have let it spread. She didn’t want to hurt them. Just me.”

He was right, too. Brienne wasn’t sure if she could call that _the worst part_ , because all of it was bad. But he was so resigned, and he knew what was happening, and he wasn’t doing anything to stop it, because it was only _him_ in danger. He didn’t understand how that kind of thing could reverberate, though she didn’t see how. He had seen the effects of death. He was living with them. How could he not realize? Brienne supposed that maybe it was easier to see a thing from the outside, but still she hated him for that, as well, almost as much as she pitied him. To have so much love and to not understand what that _meant._

Jaime met her eyes when she did not move for too long a time, and then he covered his face with his other hand and looked away.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” she pointed out.

“Maybe I do deserve it, then.”

“You do. The children are scared, Jaime.”

“She wouldn’t…”

“It doesn’t matter! Can’t you see that? They’re frightened for _you_.”

Jaime was not moved by her outburst, as unusually passionate as it was for her. His burned hand clenched into almost a fist, and he shook his head, but he was not moved.

“She’ll turn them against me soon enough,” he said absently, as if it did not matter, and Brienne was furious. Furious in a way that one could only be when faced with the stubbornness of self-loathing.

“ _Why_?” she asked. “Why is she turning them against you? Why is she still here? Why does she hate you?”

_What did you do to her_?

The question went unasked, but not unanswered. Jaime cleared his throat, and he mastered his emotions, and he looked at her at last. Brienne didn’t think she had ever seen him so sober.

“Catelyn and I were friends,” he said. “When we were children. Not for very long, but...I’d always thought well of her, and whenever we met socially, when she was married, we enjoyed each others’ company. I think I must have loved her once, as a boy, but by the time we wed…we wed for safety. After Ned’s death, she was receiving all these unwanted suitors, and she was feeling pressured to marry again, and she feared losing her independence, and Winterfell with it. I didn’t want those things, so it seemed an obvious solution. I offered her my hand, and she took it. I suppose you think that shocking.”

“I don’t know,” Brienne answered honestly, and Jaime laughed, shaking and nervous. He looked about, as if he wished to find a bottle, but she squeezed his hand, and he stopped. She continued cleaning his burns, tending them carefully, and he watched her as he spoke.

“There were a few men she wanted to avoid specifically, and she wanted to avoid them because they were grasping social climbers who wanted her castle for themselves. Our arrangement was simple: we’d marry, and we’d live at Winterfell as long as the children were young. When Robb came of age, the castle and its lands would pass to him, and we would move to town, and bring the girls with us. It was a good plan. I never planned to marry. I never saw the sense in it. But I was fond of Catelyn, and in the short time we were married, I began to see…loving her would have followed, I think. I’m not sure if the same could be said for her. I think perhaps I was already on my way, though I don’t much like to think about it now. We often shared a bed. I think that was more loneliness on her part than anything else. Does _that_ shock you?”

“A husband and wife sharing a bed? Hardly,” Brienne answered, although the truth was that it did, a bit. It was at least difficult to imagine that kind of arrangement. Passion without love. She thought about her dreams again. The anger and the way Jaime wilted and waited under her touch. She swallowed, and Jaime’s lips twitched slightly in an almost-smile, although it faded quickly.

“It was a good life,” he said. “I thought. My father thought it was a good arrangement, too, though not for the reasons I did. He wanted Winterfell for us, for the Lannisters. He’s always hated the Starks. Any family with a better reputation, really. He never thinks of making the Lannisters better. He only thinks of bringing others down. He’s always been that way. He started visiting more often. Pretending at care for the girls and for Catelyn, but I did not marry a stupid woman. Of course she saw through it. She started to distrust me along with my father. I tried…” He broke off, and he shook his head. Cutting off the excuses before they started. “I wasn’t able to convince her that I had nothing to do with my father’s plotting. She knew my family too well, and she thought…well. I suppose she thought I was one of them. I didn’t do enough to convince her. I should have cut them off. I should have stopped it.”

He lapsed into silence and stared over Brienne’s shoulder, as if he was seeing something there. She didn’t turn. She didn’t want to know.

“What happened to her?” she asked quietly, bringing him back. Jaime wiped his eyes with his free hand, and she pretended not to notice.

“She died,” he said. “But before that, she hated me. She jumped at shadows. She thought that someone was in the house, spying on her. She thought that my father was going to take her children. She thought that _I_ was responsible. I tried to help her, but it was never enough. I didn’t want…you hear stories, about the kinds of places that men send their wives when they’re…affected. I didn’t want that to happen. We tried to keep it quiet. We tried to help her. She locked herself in her room for days on end, barely eating. Even Robb couldn’t convince her to take care of herself. She wasn’t _her_ , anymore.”

“How did she die, Jaime?” Brienne asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered, and she could see that he was telling the truth. He took a shuddering breath. Brienne was careful with the cooling salve she spread over the burn, and Jaime was looking down at his hand as if it was the first gentle touch he’d had in years. “I don’t…I wasn’t there. I woke up one morning, and I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in her room. We didn’t want to frighten the girls, so Robb and I searched the castle, and the grounds. I found her body in the lake. Just…floating on top. I thought she had drowned, but…there was a cut. Here.” He drew the line on his throat with his free hand, and Brienne knew. She remembered. She had seen it, when Catelyn stood at the foot of her bed. The deep gash. “My father made sure everything was covered up. I agreed, because I didn’t want people to know…she shouldn’t be remembered like that. I never…how could she have done that to herself? It doesn’t make any sense. The cut was so deep. Even if she was so miserable. Even if she hated me so much. Where would she have found the strength for that? And why would she leave the children with _me_?”

He looked shockingly young when he asked the question. He looked at her like he expected a real answer, like he hoped that she would know how to help him. She didn’t. She shook her head helplessly, and she grabbed the bandages, and she wrapped his arm.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t…I don’t know, Jaime.”

Jaime sighed. Disappointed, maybe.

“Robb went away to school,” he said, dispassionately, staring resolutely at the floor. “And he stays with his uncle in town on holidays. I don’t blame him. He found me pulling his mother’s body from the lake. He helped me carry her into the house. He kept the girls busy when I rode for the doctor. I wouldn’t want to stay if I was him, either.” He took another bracing breath. “Ned’s younger brother offered to take the children, and so did Catelyn’s uncle, and so did her sister. But…I wanted them to be here, in Winterfell. Especially when I realized...When I realized that they could see her too.” He looked met Brienne’s eyes, gauging her reaction. “When I found her in the lake. That was the first time I saw her. She was standing on the other side, in the reeds. She looked…She was beautiful. Like herself. I was holding her in my arms, I was seeing her flesh gray and blue, and her throat cut, but across the water…I don’t know. I thought I had lost my mind. Maybe I did, and this has all been some horrible dream.”

“It hasn’t been,” Brienne said, because she could not give him much in the way of reassurances, but she could give him that, at least.

“That was the last time I saw her like that. Every time since, she has looked…”

“Yes,” Brienne agreed. “I’ve seen her.”

“Sometimes I hope I’ll…” He shook his head again, cutting himself off. “It doesn’t matter. The world thinks…I know what they think of me. They think I’m a leech, like the rest of my family. A parasite sucking the Stark family dry. But I promised her that I would protect the girls. I promised her that I wouldn’t take them away from her. And I intend to keep that promise.”

“Jaime,” she said, and she knew that her pity came through in her voice again, and she knew that Jaime would hate it, but he only looked at her, waiting for her judgement, waiting for something so much harsher than she was going to give him. “Jaime, surely you must realize that she’s…”

Her face was twisted with disgust, as she tried to think of the right words to say.

“She doesn’t look like that to them,” he said. “I don’t even know why she looks like that to you. I thought…I thought that it was only me, only because she hated me. But to them, she’s herself. She’s their mother.”

Brienne could hear it in his voice: the desire to see Catelyn again. The _envy_. He wanted to see the woman that the girls saw. He wanted to speak to her. He wanted her to care for him again. Whatever his feelings for Catelyn had been, they had been strong, and he wanted her to…Brienne wasn’t sure. Care about him. Believe in him. Believe that he was worth it. It was killing him that she had not. That she died hating him, certain that he was the monster she believed his father to be. Brienne could see it now. She was sorry for him.

“She hurts you,” she pointed out quietly. “Even though you’ve kept your promise to her. No matter what pain you’re in, no matter that she’s now trying to kill you, you have kept your promise, and still she hates you. Why? Why doesn’t she understand?”

“She hates us,” Jaime said bleakly. “All of us. Lannisters. I’ve kept my father away, and my siblings, too. I blame them as much as she did, I think, but I can’t let them…this is my burden to bear.”

“It isn’t,” Brienne pointed out, breathless and annoyed, a desire to fight back, to make _him_ fight back, welling up within her. “It isn’t your burden to bear at all. Jaime, she’s killing you.”

“I can’t…” he started. Stubborn, desperate, and she could see something terrified in him. Terrified and longing and uncertain. He wanted to leave. He was dying to leave. To take the girls and run. But he could distance himself from his words all he wanted. He could say _she blames us. She hates us_ , but he could not admit aloud how much he hated himself for what he perceived as his failure. “The children need their mother,” he said, seeing her expression.

“Sansa is terrified,” Brienne said. “She’s old enough to know it’s wrong, and that her mother should be dead. It doesn’t matter what Catelyn looks like when she visits her. And Arya grows more withdrawn, more…” _Feral_ was the word that came to mind, but Brienne would not say it. “Angry,” she settled on. “Harder to control. I don’t think she’s old enough to understand, really. Whatever her mother tells her…”

“Yes,” Jaime agreed. “I’ve seen it, too.”

“The girls needed their mother, maybe, but Catelyn would never…” Brienne shook her head. “She isn’t the same as she was. The woman I knew would never have done something like this, and she would never linger. Not if it meant holding her daughters back. She loved them so much.”

“Wouldn’t that make you stay?” Jaime wondered. “If you loved them. Wouldn’t you want to be here to watch them grow?”

“No,” Brienne said. “I would want them to be happy, and I would want them to move on.”

She met Jaime’s eyes, and Jaime nodded, and she could see that he agreed, that he _had_ been thinking it, and that he was clinging to her words as proof. He had promised Catelyn. He would guard her daughters, keep them safe. He wouldn’t take them away from her. Now she was dead, and he was still here, and so was Catelyn. Lingering. Her daughters in reach. Maybe Jaime wasn’t the only one who had promised. Maybe there was some force keeping Catelyn from being able to move on, and maybe it was tied to them, to the girls, to the castle, to Jaime.

Brienne knew little of the science of ghosts, because there was supposed to be no such thing, but she knew the stories. She knew that ghosts lingered because of violence, because of unfinished business, because of iron wills. And if there was any woman that Brienne would have described as having an iron will, it was Catelyn Stark. A woman who refused to show her grief and refused to be broken by it. A woman who married her friend to keep herself safe from unwanted propositions from men she didn’t trust, and a woman who found pleasure in the marriage even though she had not looked for love. She was a brilliant woman. A kind woman. She was not a woman who would blame a man for her own ruin unless she had every proof.

It was funny that Brienne had almost forgotten that dream. That single dream of Catelyn, as she was when Brienne knew her. Sturdy and strong, but lost and confused, too. Brienne had promised that she would look after the girls as if they were her own. She’d sworn it, actually. Like some kind of storied knight, she’d pledged to Catelyn, and Catelyn had said…

“It isn’t her,” Brienne said aloud.

“What?” Jaime asked. Brienne tied off the last of the bandage, but still she held Jaime’s hand balanced in her own, and he didn’t seem inclined to take it away. Brienne met his eyes.

“It isn’t her,” she said. “Catelyn would never…if it was Catelyn, she wouldn’t.”

Jaime hesitated. She could tell that he wanted to believe her. Why wouldn’t he? He cared for Catelyn. He had suffered much to fulfill a promise made to her. Of course he did not want to believe that the woman he had loved, in whatever capacity he had loved her, hated him so much.

“She was so different, at the end,” he argued miserably, and Brienne shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Not _so_ different. I refuse to believe it. Something else happened. This house. Something in this house, it makes you paranoid, and angry. I’ve felt it. I’m sure you have, too.”

“All these old homes have ghosts,” Jaime said. It was thoughtful, like he was quoting something that had been spoken to him long ago.

“Maybe. But this one is…” Brienne breathed out, and she squeezed his hand. He met her eyes. He looked so helpless. So yearning for something. Some help, maybe. Someone who could shoulder the burden that he had been living with. She found that she wanted to. “How do you think it will affect the girls, Jaime? If they wake up one morning, and you’re dead. Burned alive in your bed. They have their mother for now, but you would be of more use to them. Their mother is dead.” Jaime flinched a bit, and Brienne could not blame him. She didn’t like to speak the words either. She thought of Catelyn again, and her warm, motherly kindness. She thought of her own mother, dead for so long. Jaime’s mother, too, she remembered. Losing them was never easy. It was what was supposed to happen. It was the natural order of things. Better to lose a mother than for a mother to lose a child. But still. It was a near-universal pain. A thing that almost everyone eventually carried within them. So many people, all with their own fading memories of motherly smiles. Brienne wished more than anything that she could give Catelyn back to the girls. Give her back as she had been, and not as the creature she had become. She could not even fault Jaime for thinking that that was what he was doing. But it had to end. It could not continue forever.

“I thought…as long as she wasn’t hurting them,” he said.

“Yes. I know.”

“She wouldn’t hurt them.”

“I don’t think she would, no,” Brienne agreed. “Not…not physically. But there’s more than one way to hurt a person. The girls love you. Sansa worries for you constantly.”

Jaime nodded. Brienne handed him his nightshirt, and he put it back on. She was relieved. It had been an effort not to let her eyes linger on the muscles of his shoulders, and his back, and his arms. Even in the midst of all this. It made her feel horrible. He played with the hem of the shirt once it was on him. Torn and bloodied and burned from the fire.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted.

“Let me help you,” she said. He hesitated. He looked at her, and she could see the trust in his expression. She remembered being frightened of him, at first. She remembered pitying him, and feeling a quiet disgust for the way he drank away his feelings, and she remembered dreams in which she woke flushed and wanting. All of it swirled in her mind now, and she wondered when those feelings got so strong that they combined into this. This want. This care. This aching, open longing for something that she couldn’t put to name. She was usually smarter than this.

He nodded. She helped him to his feet, and she tucked her arm through his, like she was escorting him. She didn’t want to take him back into the library, where the girls were asleep. She took him instead to the study, and he took her as well, his hand on her arm, keeping her close, like he thought that she would disappear into nothing if he let her go.

There were two couches in the study. Neither looked very comfortable for adults of their size to sleep on, but she gathered the pillows together on one of them, and she directed Jaime to lie down. She covered him with a blanket. He looked up at her, and watched her silently.

“Brienne,” he said. It was the first time he’d used her given name, she thought. She didn’t mind it. She thought perhaps she should have.

“Jaime,” she returned.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She didn’t know what he was apologizing for. Sleep was catching up with him, unwanted. He tried to fight it off. She put her hand on his head, smoothing back his curls, and his breath hitched. She would not have given up this moment for anything. She did not want to leave it. She felt like she understood everything very clearly. Not just him. Not just the reality of him and his situation and the nobility of what he had done and sacrificed, but all of it. Catelyn, and the girls, and him, and Winterfell, and her own place. The way Catelyn appeared to her in that dream. The unfocused, unsettled, unhappy way she had spoken to Brienne. She could imagine Catelyn in this castle, empty and cold, afraid and uncertain. Grieving. The Starks were hardy people, and they tended to marry hardy people as well. But Catelyn had been vulnerable in that time, and how easy would it have been for something to seize onto that vulnerability? Seize it and twist and shake until even the strongest of women could not remain unchanged.

* * *

She walked the halls, after she left Jaime asleep in the study. She was shocked at her own bravery, but she was certain that she would not come to harm. She couldn’t even say why. The hate wasn’t hers. It had not touched her. She stopped outside the door to her old room. The smell of smoke still lingered in the hall. She pushed the door open, and she peered inside. It was empty, untouched. Still done up by the housekeeper like they were expecting guests. It had been Catelyn’s room, hadn’t it? She was sure of it now.

Jaime’s room was still a smoldering wreck, and it was empty. She didn’t know what she was expecting to find. She checked in on the girls’ empty rooms, as well. Nothing. She checked on the girls in the library, and she checked on Jaime in the study, and each time they were sleeping soundly, undisturbed, peaceful. Knowing that their guardian was watching over them. 

She realized at some point that she was shaking. But it wasn’t with nerves, or cold, or exhaustion. It was with something like the opposite, like she was so awake, so painfully aware of everything that was going on that she could not contain herself. She stalked from room to room. She made her presence known, and felt. She challenged the ghost, not with words, but with the simple fact that she was still there. She refused to fear.

At the end of the hallway of the family’s quarters, there was a mirror on the wall. An old, ornate, antique thing. She saw the shape in it as she approached. She saw herself.

She looked at the shape that appeared to be standing behind her in the hall. A shadowed silhouette. Dripping. Hair ragged, hanging, tangled. It was Catelyn, and it wasn’t Catelyn, and Brienne knew it.

“I will keep them safe,” she whispered aloud. She didn’t care how much of a fool she felt. There was no one here except she and the lady standing behind her. Not Catelyn. Catelyn. The lady. There had been ghost stories of her, Brienne was sure. The Lady of Winterfell. A figure who walked the halls at night. _All these old homes have ghosts,_ Jaime had said, and it was true, and there was always a lady. A lady from some distant, vague past, who had been hurt in life, and who clung to that hurt, and grieved, and lingered. Ghost stories, just silly little things. But even silly little ideas could take hold of someone, and they could hurt. “You have my word,” she said aloud, her voice stronger. “I will keep them safe.”

She was afraid, she thought, but in a distant sort of way. She was also brave. She didn’t often feel brave like this, like she was making conscious, terrifying choices. She felt brave now. She turned to face the empty hallway, and there was no one there. The lady, Catelyn, whichever. They were gone. Not even a puddle remained. And Brienne continued to walk.

* * *

In the morning, they all ate breakfast together. The housekeeper wasn’t coming today, so Brienne prepared the breakfast herself, with the help of Sansa and the occasional assistance from Jaime, who still held his hand clutched to his chest, wrapped in bandages, like a dog with an injured paw. Sansa broke two plates. Arya snapped at her to stop being so clumsy. Brienne tried to keep the peace. Jaime winced at the light coming in through the kitchen window, but he didn’t retreat to the library, and he didn’t drink anything but several cups of strong coffee. Brienne felt a resolve welling within her.

They ate quietly, not having much to say. Sansa’s hands were shaking, and she kept darting glances around the table, as if trying to understand what everyone was thinking without asking them. Arya stabbed at her toast with her fork, stabbed at her eggs with her fork, sliced up sausages with relish and didn’t look at anyone. Jaime nibbled disconsolately at some toast, but looked haggard and ill when she suggested something more substantial, and she wasn’t surprised when he shook his head.

“Girls,” Brienne started finally. She felt more whole than she had last night, and more ready to address the issue. She had cut her hair, earlier, after getting dressed. Trimmed the burnt bits. It was shorter now than was fashionable, but it felt freeing. She’d imagined Ms. Roelle telling her that she was not a proper young lady, and she’d felt real pleasure as she sliced through it. Since when had she ever been fashionable? It had never bothered her before. It certainly couldn’t bother her now. “I’m sure you have lots of questions about last night.”

“No we don’t,” Arya said. She turned to look at Jaime, and she pointed at him with her fork. “He killed our mother, and she’s back to take revenge.”

The silence that fell over the table was complete, and heavy, like a tangible thing. A thud of an absence of sound. Jaime stared at Arya, his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. Sansa’s bottom lip trembled as her head swiveled from Arya to Brienne and back to Arya again. Brienne stared.

“You’re wrong,” Sansa burst out. “He didn’t!”

“No, I’m right! Mother was right! The Lannisters killed her, and they’ll kill us, too!”

She lunged over the table, scattering plates and mugs and cutlery to the floor. She used her knife like a fencing foil, and she sliced at Jaime with an intensity and a purpose to wound that was somehow shocking. She cut his face, a jagged line up his cheek, almost to his eye. Sansa screamed. Jaime recoiled. Brienne was out of her chair, and she grabbed Arya around the waist before Arya could take another swing. Sansa was shrieking at Arya to stop. Brienne lifted Arya into the air, pulling her away, and Arya raged and fought and finally stopped, boneless, and began to cry. Sobbing wordlessly, squirming around in Brienne’s grasp so that she could cling to Brienne’s neck, bury her face in Brienne’s shoulder, wailing. Jaime watched it all in horror, his eyes wide, blood trickling down the cut on his face. Sansa was sobbing, too.

“All right,” Jaime said. His voice was hoarse, as if he had not spoken in years. “You’re right. We need to leave.”

* * *

He was uncertain if the ghost would let them. He was sure that something would stop them. But he was convinced that they had to try, and Brienne was glad.

“Pack a picnic lunch,” she said to him. “We’re just going to the lake, all right?” She wasn’t sure if the ghost would be convinced by theatrics. She felt very silly, pretending that they were just preparing for a normal day. She was afraid that too much emotion, too much energy, would alert the spirit, and they would be stopped, or harmed. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know how to do any of this. Jaime nodded, and he and Sansa worked together, and Brienne took Arya upstairs to pack some of their clothes. Arya was subdued, but her hands shook as badly as Sansa’s had during breakfast, and she was very pale. Brienne expected some resistance from her, some argument, but Arya gave none. Her violence at the table seemed as much a surprise to her as it had been to Jaime and Brienne.

They packed clothes for both girls, and Brienne packed some of her own things as well. Jaime had directed her to where he kept most of the money that he had on hand, and Brienne took it. They would have to send someone to get their things, but she wanted to be sure that they could survive without them for a little while. If they got away cleanly, if they were able to put the house behind them, she did not want to be drawn back.

When she and Arya were finished, they met Jaime and Sansa downstairs. Jaime was carrying the picnic basket, and with his good hand he was holding onto Sansa’s. She was still crying.

Brienne led the way, with Arya in her arms, carried like a much smaller child. Together, they spread out the blanket by the lake. Jaime kept looking back at the house. Brienne forced herself not to. She imagined that she would see a figure in one of the windows, and she was afraid. The Brienne of the night before, who had looked in the mirror and had seen the figure of Catelyn behind her, was no longer here today, it seemed.

She forced down half a sandwich, but it was all she could eat. She nodded to Jaime, and Jaime stood. He took Sansa’s hand again. She was carrying her pack, and he was carrying his. He looked back at Brienne, and she nodded. They’d already decided that they would go two at a time. Jaime and Sansa walked down to the edge of the water, and they didn’t look back, as Brienne had asked them not to. She still didn’t know if this was going to work. Perhaps they would do all this, be so careful, and still the ghost would follow them, wherever they ended up. Perhaps. But maybe not. Maybe Catelyn was tied here, to this house, and not to the daughters she clung to half-life for. Jaime and Sansa walked along the path at the edge of the lake. They moved towards the trees.

Brienne stood, and Arya stood with her. They would leave the blanket and the picnic basket where it lay, the food barely even half eaten. Brienne took Arya’s hand, and she picked up her pack. Arya was very pale.

“She won’t let us go,” she said. Brienne ignored her. Sansa and Jaime were in the trees, now. She could see them. They had almost reached the fence at the edge of the property. They only had to go through the side gate.

“Come on,” she said, cheerfully. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Arya didn’t respond. Brienne made her feet move. One after the other. One after the other. Arya followed, dragging behind, and on some level, it was as if Brienne knew what was going to happen before it did.

She’d told Arya not to look back. She had cautioned all of them, but Arya was Arya, and Brienne knew well after these past months of teaching her that the easiest way to get Arya to do something was to tell her not to.

They were almost to the fence themselves when Arya turned back. Just once, over her shoulder, a quick glance, but that was all it took. She froze, and Brienne turned as well, because she could not help it. She needed to know what Arya was seeing.

It was Catelyn, standing there in the daylight. She looked so real. So solid. For a moment, Brienne was willing to believe it, because it wasn’t right that she was dead. It wasn’t right that such a kind, noble woman had died so afraid, and it wasn’t right that she had been trapped here, either. It wasn’t right that she had been taken from her children, from her husband, as much or as little of a real husband as he was. None of it was right, and she wished that she could fix it.

But she couldn’t. She understood that.

Arya didn’t. She pulled her hand away, and before Brienne could grab her, she was running, back towards her mother, where Catelyn stood among their discarded picnic things, looking mournfully after her children.

“Mother, mother!” Arya was shouting as she ran, and she was so fast. Brienne couldn’t catch up. She knew it. Her skirts were in the way. Her boots were too restrictive. She ran anyway, and she heard Jaime shouting behind her, and she knew that he was running too.

Arya reached Catelyn when Brienne was still several feet back, and Brienne froze, afraid to take another step. Catelyn looked so much like herself. Brienne was hysterically certain that the slightest movement would make her change, warp, back into the woman that wasn’t Catelyn at all.

Catelyn bent down to look Arya in the eye, and she smiled at her, and then she lifted her into her arms, cradling Arya to her chest. Brienne's heart thudded, ached. Jaime drew up next to her, freezing next to her, grabbing her arm. Catelyn was so solid. So real. She was holding Arya in her arms, and Arya was happy, laughing, delighted. She hugged Catelyn. Wrapped her arms around her. It all looked so…

_Real._ It was so real. Brienne wanted to walk closer. Wanted to wrap her own arms around her dead friend. Beg her to stay. Beg her to let Arya go. Anything.

But it was Arya. Arya who pulled her arms back. Arya who tugged on the end of Catelyn’s braid, like it was something she used to do often. Whatever it was, whatever signal or sign it was, Catelyn didn’t respond the way Arya expected, and Bienne saw the moment that Arya understood.

“You’re not her,” she said. Her voice broke in the middle. “You aren’t, are you?”

Catelyn gazed at Arya, and she didn’t say anything. Her skin had been flushed, healthy, real, but it was fading, paling, going gray. Wrinkling. She was not the same.

“Let her go!” Brienne shouted. Whatever fear had been holding on to her, it released her at last, and she was able to stumble forward, pushing past whatever invisible barrier was holding her back, ripping her arm out of Jaime’s grasp. She heard Jaime shout her name. She heard Arya scream, and then Catelyn was gone, and Arya was on the ground, alone, and then the ghost was standing in front of Brienne, so fast, such a blur of movement, and she wasn’t Catelyn anymore. She was something else, and she hated, and she grabbed Brienne by the throat.

* * *

Brienne was in Winterfell. She was kissing Jaime. He was over her, lean and golden, laughing into her throat. She was laughing, too, but she was smaller, more delicate. She wasn’t herself.

She was in bed beside him. Sleeping. She looked over at him. She didn’t love him, she didn’t think, but she thought that she could. They had the rest of their lives to figure it out. He had always been a kind boy, when they were together at Riverrun, and she was glad that he hadn’t become a poison like the rest of his family.

She wondered how he had escaped. She wondered how he became so good.

Trading kisses in the kitchen before the children came down the stairs. It felt sinful, but he was her husband, and she knew that there was nothing wrong with it. She had been sure that she would mourn Ned for the rest of her days, and sometimes she went into the library and sat and stared up at that painting, and sometimes she wondered what she had been thinking. She could have withstood Petyr Baelish. She could have withstood Roose Bolton. None of them had true power over her.

But Jaime. She was enjoying herself with Jaime. That felt worse, for some reason she couldn’t figure out. It felt like it should not be allowed. Was it guilt, that lived inside her? Guilt because she was not miserable, because she did not close herself off in grief?

She watched Jaime with Robb, the way they laughed together, Jaime made boyish in his play. She watched the way he was patient with Sansa, teaching her how to draw, exclaiming over her early attempts at embroidery, with clumsy crooked flowers, allowing her to put her stitches on his ties and his shirt collars. He was not their father. He didn’t pretend to be. But he would be a good one, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?

Sometimes she felt as if she was not there. As if she was watching from very far away, and wondering why she couldn’t feel anything as she ought. She should still be grieving. She should not kiss her husband. She should not spend her nights in her husband’s bed, astride her husband’s lap, with her husband’s mouth on her cunt. He was not the husband she was supposed to have. She was not supposed to find him beautiful. She was not supposed to want.

Then Brienne was standing at the door to the library. The Lannisters were in it. Jaime and his father. They were talking. Tywin was saying horrible things, saying things about his plans, and about the ways in which he wanted to rip Winterfell from her children. _Her_ children. It was their home. Jaime laughed and deflected and changed the subject. Brienne wondered. She wondered.

She was tired. She was cold. She never got enough sleep. She locked herself in the library, and she wondered. She searched for evidence. There were eyes, always eyes, watching her. She could feel it. Sometimes when she woke, she couldn’t move, and there was a woman standing over her bed. Sometimes the woman held a knife.

And then, one night, she woke, and _she_ was the woman with the knife, and it was Jaime who slept in her bed. Jaime, with his arm stretched out over the empty place in the mattress where she should be. She dropped the knife. It clattered to the ground, but Jaime didn’t stir, and Brienne climbed into bed beside him, and she kissed him awake, and after they had lain together, she lay there, her hands trembling, and in the morning there was blood on the sheets and on her hands and on Jaime’s skin, from where the knife had cut into her fingers as she gripped it. She could not explain it, and Jaime could not understand, and she saw the way he looked at her.

_Mad_ , she thought. _He thinks I’m mad. That would make things easier for him, wouldn’t it?_

She was losing parts of herself. She could feel it. Like bits of her were sloughing away. Sansa held up her embroidery, and Brienne looked at it dully, and she could feel nothing. No pride for the straight lines, or the flowers that looked beautiful against the starched white of Jaime’s shirts. Arya told her a joke, and Brienne could only smile. It was funny, wasn’t it? Didn’t she think it was funny?

Jaime made excuses for her, and she hated him for it. _Your mother is tired_ , he said, hiding his worry behind pleasant smiles and offers to play, taking the children out of her room, leaving her to sleep in the middle of the day, and she hated him more. Robb begged her to wake up, to come back to herself. _We need you_ , he said, and she was so cold. She couldn’t…she remembered when she saw Robb for the first time. Held him in her arms. His hair was already so full, so curly. She’d cried to see it. She would love to cry now. She couldn’t. She touched his hair, his curls, and she wanted to cry, and she put her arms around him, but she could feel no warmth.

Brienne looked in the mirror, and she saw herself, and she saw the Lady standing further back. So like her, and yet so unlike her at once. So angry. So full of rage. A cold heart of stone, and she was there, always there.

_The Lannisters_ she whispered sometimes, when Brienne slept. _They want to take your children_.

“I won’t,” Jaime promised her as she cried at last. He was terrified, gripping her arms, trying to keep her steady, as she thrashed with fever in the bed. He’d never asked for this, and she hated him for it. For enduring this. Staying with her. She hated him so much. The children loved him. They would be so happy with him, and she was here, a monster, fading, losing herself slowly.

“Please,” she begged.

“I won’t take them from you!” he shouted back at her.

_Liar. Liar. He wants to take them. He wants them for himself. He and his father. He wants…_

The knife. Always the knife. In her hands. In her hands. She’d drop it. Bury it. Hide it in the bottom of the drawer, or throw it in the fire, and always it was back. She could not get rid of it.

There was a part of her that knew. A part of her that stayed herself. ~~Brienne~~ _Catelyn_. She was there. She cast the knife away. She buried it. She cried. She wanted to know why this was happening to her, and she received no answers. She fought, but it was too late, and it was not enough, and she did not know what the Lady wanted from her, but she knew what she was not willing to give.

She woke with the knife in her hands. She cast it into the fire. She slept. She woke with the knife in her hands. It was night. She walked to the lake. She stood at the edge. _I will throw it in_. But she looked in the water, and she was there. The Lady. ~~Not Brienne~~ Not Catelyn. It was the Lady, with her throat gaping wide. Her hair wet. Was it always going to come to this? Catelyn didn’t know. Whoever she was, this woman, this demon, she had suffered, and she had hurt, and now she was hurting Catelyn, too.

_I’m sorry_ , she thought, as if that would help. As if she had any reason to be sorry. _I’m sorry. I can’t._ She thought of her golden husband. She thought of her smiling children. Her Robb. He’d been so small, in her hands. She had _made_ him.

_I’m sorry_ , she thought. The knife was at her throat. The Lady shrieked at her in her reflection. She could hear it. Gurgling below the surface. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m._

She saw him, then. Her golden husband, running into the lake. Shouting her name. The blood was around her in the water. She stood among the reeds, and she wanted to cry. He turned her over. Saw the cut in her throat. He cried. He saw her. They locked eyes. She wondered what he was seeing. Was he seeing her? Or was it the Lady? _Am I me?_

_Please_ , she begged him. Begged Donyse. Begged Benjen. None of them saw her. _Please, protect them. Protect my daughters. Protect my son. Please._

_Please_ , she begged the woman in the dream. Proud, strong. Brienne. Brienne. _Please protect them._

“I will,” Brienne said. “I promise.”

* * *

Brienne could not breathe. She could not…

She could. She sat up, sucking in a sharp gasp. She was on the ground, on her back. It was wet, marshy, close to the edge of the lake. One hand had trailed into the water, tangled in the reeds, like she had tried to stop herself. She didn’t remember. She only remembered…

He stood in front of her. ~~Her golden husband. Mr. Lannister.~~ Jaime. He stood with his back to her. He was between she and ~~Catelyn~~ The Lady. Brienne’s head was swimming. She was confused. Sansa and Arya. Where were the girls?

She stumbled to her feet. She saw them, behind The Lady. Sansa was hugging her sister. Jaime shouted for them to run, but they didn’t. They were both crying.

“If it’s me you blame, then it’s me you want,” Jaime said. His voice shook. The Lady watched him. Brienne’s foot went into the muck. It was ridiculous. The whole thing. She remembered, then, what had happened to her body when her mind was elsewhere, whirling with Catelyn back in Winterfell, trying to untangle the pieces of what her life had become. She remembered Jaime shouting at The Lady to drop her. She remembered The Lady trying to drag her to the lake. She remembered choking. She remembered Jaime stopping them, trying to grab The Lady. She remembered falling when The Lady vanished, disappearing into nothing when Jaime rushed her. Where had she been? Who had she been in those moments? She felt like she was going to be sick. Jaime was shaking in front of her, but he was brave. He faced down The Lady. He had been waiting for this, Brienne realized. Ever since he saw Catelyn at the lake, saw her spirit. He had known it was coming, and he had been waiting, and he had been trying to dull it with drink, and he had been trying to make sure that the girls knew they were loved, were cared for, even if it was just by a ghost. How could he not see? How could he not realize how much he meant to them too? Maybe not more than their mother, even now. Maybe even now, they would gladly see him traded for her. But that wasn’t possible, and they all knew it. All of them except maybe Jaime.

“It isn’t her, Jaime,” she choked out. It felt like the hand was still on her throat. The fingers pressing into her neck. She spoke anyway. It rattled harshly, but she said it, and it reached Jaime, and he turned to look at her. She had never seen a man look so torn, and yet so certain. He was ready to give himself over to The Lady for her. He would have her take the girls and run and never look back. But she was not the sort of person to run. Not when there was any hope.

“You killed her,” The Lady said.

“Yes,” Jaime replied, still looking back at Brienne. She had never been able to understand the way he looked at her, but now she did. She thought she did, anyway. Like he saw in her a hope he had forgotten. “Yes, but Brienne didn’t. The girls didn’t. They’re innocent.”

“Innocent,” The Lady echoed.

“It isn’t _her_ , Jaime,” Brienne sobbed. “It never was. She…” But she didn’t have the time to put into words all that she had seen and felt from Catelyn’s last months. The care and affection she’d had for Jaime, and the love for the children, and her fear, always her fear. It infected her, infected her mind. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t his. It was the house. It was The Lady. She was the only one who should feel guilt, but she didn’t. Whatever old grudges, whatever old hurts haunted her, she was long past feeling guilty for anything. There was only rage. Brienne had always thought of ghosts as mournful things, but The Lady…she was not. She was an absence of anything. A harshness and a horribleness and a void of feeling. Whatever she had started out as, this was what she had become, and she had taken advantage of Catelyn, and she had done all of this. “She doesn’t care about the girls. She doesn’t care about anything but hurting you.” _Lannisters_ , she’d whispered, over and over, into Catelyn’s brain, and she’d tried to do it to Brienne, and she’d nearly succeeded with Arya. How often had Brienne hated him for some inconsequential thing? How often had Arya glared, and snarled. How could he not see that? Starks and Lannisters had been warring off and on for generations. It was a hate that seeped into a place, or into the people who had once lived there, and it carried. That was all The Lady cared about. Jaime was still standing there, still stubbornly, nobly guilty, still convinced that he bore some responsibility for what this horrible creature had done.

“She’s in there,” Jaime said. “I know she is.”

There was a trust in that. A resignation. _She’s in there_ , he said, and there was faith, too. Not faith that she wouldn’t hurt him. Not faith that Catelyn would even be able to win, if she _was_ in there somewhere. Not faith that he would be all right. It was faith instead that _if_ Catelyn was in there, and _if_ she was controlling The Lady, or influencing her, she would judge him as she saw fit. If she hated him. If she blamed him. She would do what she had to. Jaime didn’t care what The Lady thought of him, and he didn’t care what The Lady did. But Catelyn...

Brienne could only watch. She was too far away to do any good, and too out of breath, and too weak, and dizzy, and more helpless than she had ever felt. She could only watch, and The Lady stepped forward, slowly, and she approached Jaime, like she was giving him a chance to back out. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He seemed to stand straighter, taller than he ever had. None of that hunched, frightened defensiveness. He wasn’t drunk. He was entirely sober, and facing his fate with dignity, and Brienne had never seen anything so beautiful, and so wounded, and so sad. _Jaime_ , she thought, and something in her heart cracked.

The Lady’s hand was on his throat, but she didn’t move closer. She stood there, staring at him. He stared back at her. Brienne could see the effort it was taking not to recoil. The effort it took to stand and await his judgement. He met The Lady’s eyes, and he did not try to look away or hide, the way he always seemed to do with Brienne when she got too close.

The Lady melted away. She melted away like Catelyn had melted away earlier, when Arya revealed her deception. Her skin glowed. Her hair came back to life with color, the auburn glittering brilliantly in the sun. Her throat healed, the skin repairing itself, leaving only a long white line, a scar. Her eyes were no longer dead, hating. They were warm. Alive. Her hand was still on Jaime’s throat, and it moved, sliding up to his jaw, brushing her thumb over his beard. She smiled at him. Whatever she said to him, Brienne wasn’t close enough to hear it, but Jaime nodded, and bowed his head, and she could see his shoulders shake. Catelyn stood on her toes, and she pressed her lips to his forehead.

She was gone, then, in a rush of wind and sunlight. Dissolving before Brienne’s eyes. Sansa and Arya looked around them in wonder, smiles on their faces, spinning to watch her go, but whatever they saw, Brienne could not see. It was for them alone. Jaime stood where Catelyn had left him, his hands open and unclenched at his sides. The fear had left him. Only time would tell if the guilt had left him, too.

“Jaime,” she managed, and he turned to look at her.

“It wasn’t her,” Arya was sobbing. Sansa was hugging her, and shushing her, and accepting her apologies and making apologies of her own. That wasn’t for Brienne, either. None of it was, really. She was outside it all, and yet she was here, with them. She felt she was a part of it, somehow. Jaime looked her up and down, and he nodded. He flinched when he looked at her throat, and he stepped closer to examine it.

“Thank you,” he said. She shook her head. One corner of his lips went up in half a smile. His thumb brushed over the place where she knew a bruise would form. “Gods, you’re a stubborn creature. You saved us.”

“No,” she said. “Catelyn did that.”

“She had some help,” Jaime said, and Brienne allowed it, because she did not want to talk about it any longer. “Let’s go,” Jaime said, and he reached for her hand to help pull her feet out of the muck. She took it.

* * *

It had been two years. The girls still weren’t ready, and Brienne didn’t blame them. They were back in Wintertown, with their aunt, Lyanna Targaryen, and her son.

Brienne wasn’t sure _she_ was ready. But it had been two years, and she had spent them happy. Happy, content, sometimes deliriously so. More than she ever thought she would be.

When they left Winterfell, they returned first to Wintertown, where they stayed in a hotel for weeks, anxious because they were convinced that it wouldn’t be enough. That Catelyn would still come for them. That The Lady would have somehow followed them. But there was no sign, and there was peace. When Jaime’s father died, they returned to Casterly Rock.

He’d offered, at the beginning, to find her another placement. Told her that she would have a recommendation as glowing as he could make it without telling anyone the truth. He meant to be a more involved guardian, for the girls and for Robb, as much as they would allow.

“But we would be very happy if you stayed,” he had said, and so she had stayed. She had not wanted to leave them. _I promised_ , was what she told Jaime, and he had nodded, because he understood, and that had been the end of it. But it was more than that. It was seeing the way the girls flourished away from the ghost of the lady who was not their mother. The way Arya became joyful and bright again. The way Sansa sewed and sang and danced in the library, practicing for the dances she would soon be allowed to attend. The way Jaime resisted the temptation to drink, and sweated through the worst of the withdrawals, and eventually reached a point where he seemed as content as Brienne was.

It was almost a full year before he kissed her. She’d felt it coming, all that time, although there was a part of her that wondered if she was imagining things. He would look at her sometimes, and he would look so fond. So hopelessly fond, like it was something that couldn’t be contained. She was fascinated by it. It was a mystery. Or maybe it wasn’t, because when he kissed her, she found that she wasn’t terribly surprised. She had never been kissed before. It _should_ have been a surprise. He was a beautiful man, and beautiful men had never looked for very long at her.

But he wasn’t just any man. He was Jaime, and she knew him, and she knew that he looked at her a lot. She would catch him at it, sometimes. The fond looks he gave her over the dinner table. The way he looked at her when he stood in the doorway and watched her with the children. He laughed at her when she was stubborn, and when she was surly, and when she was angry, and when she was amused. He laughed so much, away from Winterfell. It wasn’t like he was a different person, but like he was a person more whole. A person who was more complete than the shade he had been.

So he kissed her, and she kissed him back. She did not doubt him, or pull away, or sputter out excuses and then try to hide from him. She was nervous, after, but only in a general way. She knew him so well.

For weeks it was only kisses, only idle touches, passed in secret in the night, or in the halls when they were sure that the girls were elsewhere. Casterly Rock under Jaime’s hand was warmer than Winterfell. Brighter. Jaime talked often about how cold and frightening it had been to him when he was a boy, and how he wanted desperately for it to be different. For the girls, for himself, for _her_.

Sometimes he asked her, seriously. Reminded her. _You could find another place if you wanted. You don’t need to be here_. But she understood that, too. She understood that he was not asking because he wanted to be rid of her, but because he was afraid of trapping her, or making her _feel_ trapped, the way he feared that Catelyn felt trapped at the end.

Every time, she reminded him. _I know. I choose to stay_ , and she watched and felt the way his muscles relaxed under her touch. The way he kissed her afterward would always be so hungry, so desperate, so _pleased_ to be chosen.

They did not tell the girls until they were sure they were ready. Until Jaime proposed marriage to her. From the outside, perhaps it looked like a passionless choice. The kind of choice that Jaime and Catelyn had made before them. The girls were excited, tentative, but happy, and seemed mostly relieved that Brienne would not be leaving them. Brienne wondered at how it looked from the outside. She’d heard plenty of stories in the past. Whispers about governesses and housemaids ending up married to the man of the manor, and how it looked, and how people talked about that woman afterward, never letting her forget. She found that she didn’t care. Ms. Roelle had done her best to make Brienne care about the way the world would see her, and she had done her best to make sure that Brienne would be aware of every way in which she was considered deficient. But she had pushed too hard, Brienne thought, and Brienne now no longer cared at all. Why should she, if she was never going to win? Why should she, when the alternative was to love and to be loved? To be respectable was to know her place and to remain lonely. Why would she ever choose that?

It wasn’t that she delighted in it, in being secret, and kissing him in quiet. She shared his bed long before they were engaged, but that was just because she wanted to. She didn’t think about what it would mean. She didn’t think he liked it, either. He told her that he wanted to kiss her in the sunlight. He told her that he wanted to wed her in the morning, so he would have the whole rest of the day to love her. She blushed when he said those things, but not because of shame. She blushed because she wanted it so very badly. She blushed because she could have it, and because she knew it was in reach.

And now, it was two days before their wedding. They were to be married in Wintertown, but she had wanted to do this, first.

Jaime stayed at the gate. He’d said that he would accompany her, but she had talked him out of it. They argued, which was a strange thing. It was something that she had to do, but it wasn’t something that _he_ needed, and she would not risk him for a whim. He agreed to let her go, but he stood at the gate, waiting, the carriage behind him. He kissed her a final time. There was so much in it. So much that burned between them. He was afraid.

She wasn’t.

She walked up to the house. The ring of keys was in her hand, taken from Miss Donyse, who had been seeing to the house regularly in the family’s absence. As far as Brienne could ascertain, she never saw a single ghost.

Brienne saw no ghosts, either, as she made her way through the foyer. Most of the furniture was covered with white sheets. The floor was spotless. Her boot heels clacked against the tile, and against the wooden staircase. The air felt light. Lighter than it ever had when she lived here before. Two years, it had been, and she was sure that was not so long to forget the way the place felt, and she was sure now that it was empty. She was relieved.

She walked down the long hallway of the family’s wing. She approached the mirror at the end, where she had once seen The Lady. She had dreamed of it, more than once. Seeing Catelyn behind the glass. As the wedding approached, and the guilt built within her, Brienne had found that she needed to see it. Needed to be sure.

There was no one in the mirror with her. Just her, alone. The same homely face. Her hair still cut rather too short to be fashionable. She had not improved in two years, she didn’t think. Perhaps she looked happier. Perhaps there was something of a light. But in practical terms…she was the same. Just Brienne, just as she had ever been. It was enough.

“The girls are safe,” she said aloud. It felt ridiculous in the empty house. She could not be sure that Catelyn was even still here to listen. Brienne hoped that she wasn’t. She hoped that the events at the lake two years ago had been enough to help her move on. “I have protected them, and so has Jaime. We will continue to keep them safe, together.” There was no answer. Brienne hadn’t expected one, really, but still there was a silly part of her that had expected something. Some flickering in the mirror, perhaps. Some sign in her reflection that Catelyn heard her words. She smiled at herself, rueful. The mirror still stayed empty. “They miss you,” she said, to her reflection. To Catelyn, wherever she was. “Jaime misses you. I miss you. I regret that we didn’t get to know each other as well as I would have liked, in life. I admired you greatly.” She was not usually one for words, but she could feel them welling up within her. Wanting to say so much. But what was there to say? What would Catelyn want to hear? “Thank you,” she settled on. “For saving him. For letting him live.” She remembered Catelyn as she saw her in those last moments. Fighting off The Lady. Coming back to herself for just long enough. Wherever she was, Brienne hoped that she was at peace.

Happily, she turned back down the hallway. She left the mirror behind. She headed down the stairs, and to the foyer. She locked the door behind her, and then she walked down the long drive to where Jaime waited, his hands in his pockets, still anxious, so visibly relieved to see her.

She didn’t turn back. If she had, it was possible that she would see that silhouette standing in the window, watching them. A hand on the curtain, perhaps. Drawing it back. The Lady had been in Winterfell for far longer than Catelyn Stark, and maybe she lingered there still, waiting.

Maybe, but probably not. Brienne had never been one for fancies like that.

Even so, she didn’t turn around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whew, hope you enjoyed this. i'm sorry for the length, and I know it didn't need to be this long, but thank you for reading it anyway lmao

**Author's Note:**

> I made a playlist for this fic too! You can find it under the same burner account that my Honor Compels Me playlist is under! It's part spooky vibes, part songs that make me feel spooky for some reason, and a lot of GOT soundtrack nonsense!


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